Wola Podcast

This episode examines the systematic dismantling of asylum protections in the United States under the Trump administration. Our guests are two attorney-advocates: Heather Hogan, Policy and Practice Counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), and Peter Habib, Staff Attorney at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS). Hogan and Habib emphasize that the United States has legal obligations under the 1980 Refugee Act and international agreements stemming from World War II—commitments that other nations have historically looked to America to model. Barriers the Trump administration has erected against asylum seekers include a January 2025 proclamation suspending asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, courthouse arrests of immigrants appearing for their hearings, expanded mandatory detention policies, and a stacked Board of Immigration Appeals issuing precedential decisions that narrow eligibility grounds. Hogan and Habib note that the administration has targeted the "particular social group"

Por el Mes de la Mujer, estamos lanzando un episodio especial de Latin America Today con una conversación con Collette Spinetti — activista trans uruguaya, profesora de literatura y la primera mujer trans en ocupar un puesto de secretaria de Estado en Uruguay. En este episodio, Collette conversa con Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, Presidenta de WOLA, sobre lo que significa romper barreras históricas como mujer trans en un cargo público, el avance global de los movimientos antiderechos y su trabajo en Uruguay para avanzar en la igualdad en un mundo cada vez más desigual. Sobre Colette Spinetti Collette Spinetti es activista trans uruguaya, profesora de literatura y una figura pionera en la vida pública de América Latina. Fue la primera profesora trans del Uruguay y actualmente es la primera mujer trans en ocupar un cargo de Secretaría de Estado, como Secretaria de Derechos Humanos bajo la presidencia de Yamandú Orsi. Defensora de larga trayectoria de los derechos LGBTQ+, de las mujeres y de las personas privadas de

For Women's Month, we're releasing a special episode of Latin America Today featuring a conversation with Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez — a Mexican human rights lawyer with over two decades of experience working on enforced disappearances, femicides, migrants' rights, and women's rights across Mexico and Central America.  In this episode, Ana Lorena speaks with WOLA's Corie Welch about what the crisis of enforced disappearances looks like today, the outsized role women have played in confronting it, and what enforced disappearances in the context of U.S. immigration enforcement tells us about the state of democracy and rule of law.  About Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez  Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez is a Mexican human rights lawyer with over two decades of experience working on enforced disappearances, femicides, and the rights of women and migrants across Mexico and Central America. She is the founder and former Executive Director of the Foundation for Justice and Democratic Rule of Law, a regional NGO worki

This episode assesses the "transition"—if that is the correct word—in Venezuela nine weeks after the January 3 U.S. military operation that extracted Nicolás Maduro. This conversation with Laura Dib, director of WOLA's Venezuela program, and Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin American Energy Program at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, focus particularly on the role of oil, the country's largest source of foreign exchange by far. Dr. Monaldi acknowledges that oil revenues have increased significantly. However, these revenues now flow into a U.S.-controlled account. The lack of transparency around this fund—including unknown balances and unclear disbursement rules—is deeply concerning. Dib emphasizes that ordinary Venezuelans have yet to feel material improvements. Over 12.4 million out of perhaps 29 million Venezuelans facing severe humanitarian needs, and "when Venezuelans go to a supermarket right now, they don't really feel a change." While more than 600 political prisoners have be

This episode features Mark Ungar, a professor of criminal justice and political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York. Ungar has written extensively on the rule of law, policing, and human rights in Latin America, and more recently has focused his research on environmental organized crime across the Amazon basin. Ungar notes that environmental organized crime—illegal gold mining, logging, cattle ranching, and land grabbing—has become the third largest criminal enterprise globally and is now deeply intertwined with narcotrafficking operations. Rather than existing as separate phenomena, these activities share infrastructure, routes, and personnel. Criminal networks carrying out environmental organized crime are deeply intertwined with state actors and the legal economy. The nexus involves governors, military officials, environmental ministry personnel, and municipal authorities at multiple levels. Even when good laws exist, implementation remains weak because investigations rarely lea

This episode is a conversation with John Walsh, WOLA's director for Drug Policy and the Andes, about the ongoing U.S. military attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans. When Walsh and host Adam Isacson recorded this episode, on February 13, 2026, 35 attacks had killed at least 131 people since September 2, 2025—an average of four killings every five days—and another attack later that day killed 3 more people. Walsh and Isacson just published a WOLA commentary, "The Boat Strikes are Still Happening: Five Things You Need to Know," warning against the dangerous normalization of extrajudicial executions carried out directly by the U.S. military. Five months into this campaign, the strikes are fading from public attention despite their illegality. Media coverage has dwindled from the intense scrutiny of September and the revelations about "double tap" strikes on survivors in December to a trickle of stories. This normalization poses dangers: the justifications being used could extend to other

Following the Trump administration's January 3, 2026 military operation in Venezuela and its lethal strikes on boats suspected of carrying drugs, its threats of unilateral U.S. military action inside Mexico and Colombia have taken on new urgency. WOLA's Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli and Stephanie Brewer join Adam Isacson to examine what such actions would mean for two of Washington's most important partners in the hemisphere. The conversation opens with a sobering parallel: days before recording, Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street in what appears to be another grossly unjustified use of lethal force. Both guests draw on their countries' painful experiences with security force violence to illuminate patterns now emerging in the United States: the demonization and victim-blaming, the battle over evidence and documentation, and the long struggle for accountability. The episode then turns to the mounting threats of U.S. military intervention. Trump has floated drone strikes and Special F

January 20, 2026 is the first anniversary of Donald Trump's second inauguration. As we pass this milestone, WOLA President Carolina Jiménez Sandoval and Vice President for Programs Maureen Meyer join Adam Isacson to take stock of a year that has fundamentally transformed U.S. policy toward Latin America—and not for the better. This episode is a companion of a review analysis that Meyer published on January 15, 2026, tracking how the past year saw U.S. policy undermining democracy and human rights promotion, interfering in elections, hitting immigrants from the region quite hard, and taking the "war on drugs" to new extremes. This episode's conversation traces a dramatic shift: during the period following the Cold War, U.S. policy in the region, despite critical flaws, moved gradually toward cooperation, partnership, and at least rhetorical support for democracy and human rights. That trajectory has reversed. As Meyer explains, democracy promotion has "all but disappeared" from the administration's foreign

After midnight on January 3, 2026, the Trump administration bombed Venezuelan military sites and extracted the country's authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro. President Trump declared that the United States is now "running" Venezuela and emphasized access to its oil reserves. The rest of Maduro's government—the key political figures, the generals, the intelligence chiefs, the colectivos—remains in place. In this episode recorded January 6, as shockwaves from this historic intervention spread across the hemisphere, host Adam Isacson speaks with WOLA President Carolina Jiménez Sandoval and Venezuela Program Director Laura Dib about what just happened, the serious risks ahead, and what comes next. The conversation covers: The immediate humanitarian situation: continued repression, a looming economic crisis, and uncertainty about who is actually in charge. Why Washington appears ready to work with Chavismo—the same authoritarian structure it claimed to oppose—while sidelining Venezuela's democratic opposition. T

In this series from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), prominent decision-makers from across the Americas—those who have been at the heart of democratic governance—share personal reflections and insights on the meaning, challenges, and future of democracy in the region. In each episode, members of the WOLA team sit down with a current or former political figure from the Americas to explore democracy through different lenses: what it means to them, the challenges it faces, and why it remains essential today. Each conversation pairs democracy with a new dimension—transition, justice, leadership, and beyond.  

WOLA presents a new episode about El Salvador, coinciding with our awarding of our 2025 Human Rights Award to MOVIR, El Salvador’s Movement of Victims of the Regime, which supports victims and families of arbitrary detentions carried out by President Nayib Bukele’s government. In this conversation, Ricardo Valencia, assistant professor of public relations in the Department of Communications at California State University, Fullerton, explains why the current popularity of El Salvador’s authoritarian president rests on a surprisingly fragile foundation. Dr. Valencia, a former journalist in El Salvador and an expert on political and activist communications, explains that Bukele is facing several challenges to his rule that even a slick propaganda operation cannot paper over. These include a lackluster economy, mainstream voters’ discomfort with the regime’s celebrations of cruelty and imprisonment, Bukele’s relations with just one political party in the United States, the loss of emigration as an “escape valve”

A special episode as part of WOLA’s 2025 Human Rights Awards Month President Nayib Bukele’s government has jailed nearly 2 percent of El Salvador’s entire population—the highest incarceration rate in the world. Still, because violence has dropped sharply, political figures across Latin America speak about emulating Bukele’s “security model.” But behind the videos of mega-prisons and tweets about plunging homicide rates lies a darker, less sustainable reality. In this WOLA Podcast episode, Adam Isacson speaks with Beatriz Magaloni (personal site / Stanford site), a political scientist at Stanford University and co-author (with Alberto Díaz-Cayeros) of a Foreign Affairs article published September 11, 2025: “Does the Bukele Model Have a Future?” Their conversation reveals what Magaloni calls “a system of state terror and resource extraction,” and explores why El Salvador’s experiment in mass incarceration may ultimately collapse under its own weight. In fieldwork conducted since last year, Dr. Magaloni intervie

Since late August, the Trump administration has sent a flotilla of U.S. warships to the southern Caribbean, in the largest naval display in the region in decades. On September 2, a U.S. drone strike sank a small boat near the Venezuelan coast, killing as many as eleven civilians. Administration officials allege the vessel carried cocaine, but have presented no evidence. In this WOLA Podcast episode, Adam Isacson speaks with Laura Dib, Director for Venezuela, and John Walsh, Director for Drug Policy and the Andes, about the shockwaves from this escalation, both region-wide and especially in Venezuela. An Extreme New Military Stance: Seven warships and up to 7,000 personnel now patrol Caribbean waters near Venezuela. A lethal strike on September 2 marks, as Walsh calls it, “a radical departure” from decades of U.S. maritime drug-interdiction practice. Serious Legal and Human-Rights Implications: U.S. law authorizes interdiction of illegal drugs, not summary execution. “There’s a word in English for an act like

Since January, the United States’ migrant detention and deportation system, which was already troubled, has become increasingly opaque. Access to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities is restricted, internal oversight agencies have been hollowed out, and credible information about conditions inside is scarce. Yet reports that have emerged, some from those who have recently been deported, tell a troubling story echoing the darkest moments of recent U.S. immigration history. In late July and early August, researchers from WOLA and the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) set out to pierce this “black box” by visiting cities in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico that are key deportation hubs. There, they interviewed deported migrants, service providers, advocates, experts, and government officials to learn what they are hearing about conditions in U.S. detention. The findings are disturbing. They point to a resurgence of family separations, cruel treatment, miserable, unhealthy conditions, and deportatio

Nearly three years into President Gustavo Petro’s term, his flagship “Total Peace” initiative is faltering. On this episode of the WOLA Podcast, Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, WOLA’s Director for the Andes, provides a sweeping overview of Colombia’s peace and security reality.

A Special Pride Month Episode This special Pride Month episode brings together the voices of six LGBTIQ+ activists from across Latin America—Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, and El Salvador—who share their experiences as leaders in the fight for equality and justice. Through their stories, we explore what Pride means in contexts of resistance, the state of LGBTIQ+ rights across the region, and the ongoing work to build more inclusive societies.  

This special Pride Month episode brings together the voices of six LGBTIQ+ activists from across Latin America—Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, and El Salvador—who share their experiences as leaders in the fight for equality and justice. Through their stories, we explore what Pride means in contexts of resistance, the state of LGBTIQ+ rights across the region, and the ongoing work to build more inclusive societies.

In the wake of escalating immigration enforcement targeting vulnerable migrant communities, this Pride Month episode brings essential perspective from the frontlines. We sit down with Brigitte Baltazar Lujano, a trans woman who herself experienced deportation and now leads critical advocacy and service work for LGBTQ+ migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border with the Tijuana and San Diego-based organization Al Otro Lado.

For the second year in a row, what had been an uneventful, consensus-driven United Nations meeting on drug policy saw unexpected drama and signs of real change. At the 68th session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna in March 2025, governments approved the formation of an independent expert commission to recommend changes to the architecture of global drug policy, which has changed little since the early 1960s. Colombia again played a catalytic role, as it did in 2024. But this time, the United States—under the new Trump administration—tried to block nearly everything, isolating itself diplomatically in the process. In this episode of the WOLA Podcast, Adam Isacson speaks with three experts who were in Vienna: Ann Fordham, Executive Director of the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), a network of 195 organizations working to reform global drug policy. Isabel Pereira, Senior Coordinator for drug policy at DeJusticia, a Bogotá-based think tank and advocacy group. John Walsh, WOLA’s

**This podcast is in Spanish. Stay tuned for an English summary! Este Mes de la Mujer, en WOLA lanzamos una serie especial de nuestro podcast para amplificar voces feministas que luchan por los derechos humanos en América Latina. En nuestro último episodio, conversamos con Ruth López, directora del programa de anticorrupción en Cristosal, sobre su trabajo en la lucha contra la corrupción y el autoritarismo en El Salvador. Nuestra invitada Ruth López es abogada, defensora de los derechos humanos y directora del programa de anticorrupción de Cristosal, una organización que trabaja en la promoción de derechos humanos, estado de derecho y la lucha contra la corrupción en El Salvador. Ruth ha sido reconocida por su valentía y liderazgo en la defensa de los derechos humanos en un contexto difícil, y fue incluida en la lista de las 100 mujeres más influyentes de 2024 de la BBC. Su trabajo se centra en la lucha por la justicia, la transparencia y el respeto de los derechos humanos en El Salvador, donde el autoritaris