Notes from the World

Michael Deibert
  • 5.0 (14)
  • NEWS

Politics, culture, and society from the Caribbean, Latin America, and beyond.

  1. "What you basically have in Venezuela is the same dictatorship in place"

    1H AGO

    "What you basically have in Venezuela is the same dictatorship in place"

    Juan Forero is the South America bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. Based in Bogotá, Colombia, he worked for both the New York Times and National Public Radio before joining the Journal, and he has been reporting on Latin America for more than 20 years. He joined us on Notes From the World today to discuss the state of Venezuela - now five months after the seizure of Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores by U.S. forces - and that of Colombia, as the presidential tenure of Gustavo Petro draws to a close and the country prepares for presidential elections at the end of this month.

    31 min
  2. “Where Is Due Process? Where Is Democracy? Who Is Standing Up?” Immigration Policy In Trump's America

    APR 26

    “Where Is Due Process? Where Is Democracy? Who Is Standing Up?” Immigration Policy In Trump's America

    Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, immigration policy in the United States has undergone profound changes. Masked, anonymous agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), both operating under the purview of the United States Department of Homeland Security, have roamed U.S. cities and towns, shattering car windows and dragging people from their vehicles, seizing high school students, chasing terrified U.S. citizens into their homes and stalking courthouse halls where immigrants are reporting for hearings in New York, Miami and elsewhere. The past January, in Minneapolis, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross gunned down poet and mother Renée Good and Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez murdered nurse Alex Pretti. As more and more people disappeared into the maw of a detention regime spanning from Florida to Louisiana to Texas, cases such as that of Emmanuel Damas became ever-more coming. Damas, a 56 year-old, had a pending asylum claim, and entered the U.S. from Haiti via the Biden-era humanitarian parole program but was taken into ICE custody in Boston in September 2025 and died this past March while in custody in Arizona due to complications from an infected tooth. He was one of at least 17 people in ICE custody, who, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle, died after medical staff delayed or failed to provide critical medical care that might have saved their lives. To discuss the U.S. government’s current immigration policies and the conditions those detained under them are currently living under, we are joined on Notes from the World by three guests today: Ruby Powers, a Houston-based attorney who has represented clients detained at Camp East Montana, an immigrant detention facility located on the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base in El Paso, Texas; Lomi Kriel, a statewide investigative reporter for the Texas Tribune who has extensively reported on both Camp East Montana and the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Frio County in South Texas; and Abigail Philips, a Miami-based attorney who has represented clients detained at the South Florida Detention Facility, the immigration detention facility located inside Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve and better known as Alligator Alcatraz.

    1h 3m
  3. Democratic Republic of Congo: “There Is Definitely a Strong Sense of Fear”

    APR 19

    Democratic Republic of Congo: “There Is Definitely a Strong Sense of Fear”

    As large as Western Europe or the United States east of the Mississippi River, the Democratic Republic of Congo remains a place where Africa’s greatest potential and most wrenching tragedies are frequently lived out. Its first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was kidnapped and killed with the connivance of former colonial ruler Belgium in 1961, and for more than three decades afterwards, Congo - for a time during this period renamed Zaire - groaned under the kleptocratic rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. After Mobutu’s ousting in 1997 by an armed rebellion backed by the Rwandan government, Congo saw the rule and assasination of Mobutu’s successor, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the great Second Congo War from 1998 until 2003, the long presidency of Laurent Kabila’s son, Joseph Kabila, and ongoing violence and unrest, particularly in its eastern regions abutting Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. The nation of Rwanda, ruled by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) since 1994, has been particularly involved in Congo’s troubles, sponsoring a series of rebel groups and sometimes intervening directly with its military in the country. Most recently, Rwanda has supported the Mouvement du 23 Mars (the March 23rd Movement or M23) rebels, who launched a rebellion from 2012 until 2013 and then again beginning in late 2021 until today, during which it has seized a wide swathe of the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. Since 2019, DR Congo itself has been ruled by Felix Tshisekedi, who has hewed to an ever-more authoritarian path as he pursued his political and military goals. Tshisekedi’s predecessor as president, Joseph Kabila, was sentenced to death for his alleged conspiring with the M23 and has since resurfaced in the M23-controlled eastern city of Goma. This past December, Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame signed a peace deal in Washington, DC to end the fighting, though it still continues to this day. To discuss the complex situation in Congo today, we are joined on Notes from the World by the journalist Emmet Livingstone, who has lived in and reported from the country since 2022, and Clémentine de Montjoye, senior Great Lakes of Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

    49 min
  4. "We keep pushing away the very people who would help us accomplish our foreign policy goals"

    MAR 30

    "We keep pushing away the very people who would help us accomplish our foreign policy goals"

    Luis Moreno was born in New York City and graduated with a BA in History from Fordham University and an MA in Education at Kean College before joining the foreign service. In a long and varied career he held, among other posts, the role of refugee coordinator and the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti; the narcotics affairs director at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia from 1997 to 2001; U.S. consul general in Monterrey, Mexico; deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Israel; political-military affairs minister counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad; and U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica. Today, he is a member of The Steady State, an organization of nearly 400 former national security officials who remain committed to their oaths to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and which was formed in 2016 in response to rising authoritarian tendencies and the erosion of U.S. credibility and alliances.” On today’s Notes from the World, we spoke about his experiences and the state of U.S. diplomacy today.

    39 min
  5. Iran: "Life Is Unbearable Under the Islamic Republic"

    MAR 20

    Iran: "Life Is Unbearable Under the Islamic Republic"

    (Cover Image: Footage of an 8 January 2026 protest in Bandar-e Anzali, northern Iran, shared via Telegram.) On 28 February of this year, the United States and Israel launched attacks against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a military operation that has been ongoing for three weeks at the time of this broadcast. The assault has brought a large swathe of the Middle East into conflict, with Iran launching retaliatory attacks on Israel and U.S. facilities in Iraq as well as military and civilian infrastructure in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Most shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway for global oil and gas transport that supplies roughly one-fifth of the world’s crude oil, has been halted since hostilities began. The conflict comes on the heels of what by all accounts was a mass slaughter of protesters by the Islamic Republic’s security forces inside Iran earlier this year, with the death toll being placed well into the thousands. Joining us to discuss the situation on Notes From the World today are Arash Azizi, a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at Yale University and contributing writer at the Atlantic, and Arina Moradi, a spokeswoman for Hengaw, a human rights organization that focuses on reporting and documenting human rights violations in Iran.

    33 min
  6. Mexico's CJNG made violence “into their language”

    MAR 16

    Mexico's CJNG made violence “into their language”

    Today on Notes from the World, we are joined by José de Cordoba, the longtime Mexico City correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. We have a wide-ranging discussion about the significance of the recent killing of Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) leader Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes aka El Mencho, how Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is faring a year and a half into her term and how negotiations over the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) could impact Mexico’s relationship with the United States.

    26 min
  7. “It took so much violence to keep slavery in place for 400 years.”

    FEB 24

    “It took so much violence to keep slavery in place for 400 years.”

    Carrie Gibson is the author of three works of history: Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day (2014), El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (2019) and the subject of our conversation today, The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas (2026). Prior to gaining a PhD in history at the University of Cambridge in 2011, she worked as journalist for The Guardian and Observer in London and currently lives in Seoul, South Korea.

    37 min
  8. “This is just the latest symbol of a much larger Florida story.”

    FEB 13

    “This is just the latest symbol of a much larger Florida story.”

    Last month, in Florida’s Manatee County along the state’s western Gulf Coast, the Seattle-based marine terminal services company SSA Marine Inc. announced that it intended to partner with a Tampa, Florida-based holding company, Slip Knott LLC, to build an enormous new cruise port adjacent to the county’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge. The patch of land in question is lushly festooned with seagrass coverage and mangroves, and is home to oysters, clams, reddish, pelicans and other fauna. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the plan has met with fierce local opposition, the latest chapter in the long struggle between those who seek to protect Flrodia’s complex ecosystem and those who see it as a vehicle for economic benefit and personal enrichment. To get a better grasp on what is being proposed and what’s at stake, Notes from the World spoke to Max Chesnes, the Environment Reporter for the Tampa Bay Times; Maya Burke, the Assistant Director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, an intergovernmental partnership of Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco and Pinellas counties and a number of other state and federal entities that seeks to build partnerships to restore and protect Tampa Bay; and Abbey Tyrna, the Executive Director of Suncoast Waterkeeper, an organization focused on protecting and restoring the waters on Florida’s Suncoast. [Image: Terra Ceia Preserve in Manatee County, Florida with the city of Tampa in the background. Photo via Southwest Florida Water Management District.]

    37 min
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About

Politics, culture, and society from the Caribbean, Latin America, and beyond.

Information

  • Creator
    Michael Deibert
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Notes from the World