This piece appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
Michael Fox remembers the feeling of walking into Estadio Chile, now renamed Estadio Víctor Jara, in Santiago. Inside the stadium where the beloved singer Víctor Jara was detained, tortured, and murdered in the days following the 1973 U.S.-backed military coup, paper memorials still hang from the back of seats. They are simple: black-and-white photocopies taped in place to remember the dead. It was in this stadium that Jara composed his last poem before he was killed.
“The ghosts are still alive,” Michael says. “These places carry energy.”
For Michael, a former NACLA editor and journalist who has lived in Latin America for most of the past two decades, moments like this are not tourist stops or symbolic gestures. They give shape to Under the Shadow, the investigative podcast he reports and hosts in collaboration with NACLA and The Real News Network. Across its first two seasons, the series documents the human consequences of U.S. intervention in Latin America, moving between sites of Cold War massacres and present-day bombings to trace how legacies of past violence continue to shape the hemisphere today. Rather than narrating events from afar, Michael travels to the places where they unfolded—and where their consequences remain visible— to ask what history feels like on the ground.
Across its first two seasons, the series documents the human consequences of U.S. intervention in Latin America, moving between sites of Cold War massacres and present-day bombings to trace how legacies of past violence continue to shape the hemisphere today.
This approach reflects a longstanding tradition within NACLA’s work: connecting structural analysis of U.S. policy to lived experience across Latin America. In the first season of Under the Shadow, Michael explored the legacies of U.S. Cold War intervention through dictatorships, coups, and massacres in Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, and Honduras. His initial plan for the second season was to examine Plan Condor, the U.S.-backed campaign of coordinated repression that targeted leftist activists across South America. Yet with the renewed escalation of U.S. military action under the Trump administration, the project shifted in real time. Instead of looking only backward, Michael began documenting what he describes as a new phase of “unmasked U.S. militarism” as it unfolds across the region.
It is not easy work. He visited Santiago’s Estadio Víctor Jara as part of his reporting for the podcast’s upcoming third season. “When you go to these places, you’re there to understand the past and to try to feel what lingers today,” he says. “That’s part of what I try to do in this podcast: feel that emotion and connect with the legacy and the ghosts.”
NACLA spoke with Michael about the podcast, the resurgence of open U.S. militarism in the hemisphere, and the power of audio storytelling to bring the past and present into sharper focus.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Bret Gustafson: Under the Shadow moves between sites of historical memory and places where violence is unfolding right now. What are you trying to do with the podcast in this political moment?
Michael Fox: We can’t all be in every place at the same time. We can’t all travel to every country in the region. Most people never get the opportunity to see firsthand what U.S. foreign policy actually means for people living through it. My goal with the podcast is to bring listeners there—not just explain events, but help people experience them.
In the first season I went back to places where things happened—massacres, disappearances, interventions—and tried to understand what remains today. What does that history feel like in the present? What does it look like when you stand in those spaces?
With this new season I’m trying to bring listeners to places where events are unfolding in real time—to Caracas, for example, as bombs are falling. I spoke with people who were there that night. I worked with reporters visiting the sites that were hit. That’s very different work.
I think there is no better way to do this than through audio and through podcasting. Video is powerful but you’re still behind a screen, on the other side, watching something happening. With audio you can close your eyes and feel like you’re walking through the streets of 1980s Nicaragua as the Contras are trying to fight the Sandinista government. Or you’re there in Cuba as the oil blockade has rolled into weeks and months. The goal is to take people there.
My goal is to bring you along to talk to people, to learn about their lives, and to understand the impact of U.S. policies abroad now as well as decades, or even centuries, in the past.
That’s something that gets lost in regular news coverage. It’s almost always about Trump or the kidnapping of Maduro or what some famous guy said. It’s about the powerful people. We don’t hear about the impact on the lives of everyday people in these countries. We forget that more than 100 people died in the U.S. bombing raid of Venezuela on January 3. My goal is to bring you along to talk to people, to learn about their lives, and to understand the impact of U.S. policies abroad now as well as decades, or even centuries, in the past.
BG: There is no shortage of stories about U.S. intervention in the hemisphere. One of the things the podcast does especially well is show how intervention takes many different forms—from direct invasion to proxy wars and intelligence support. How are you thinking about those continuities across past and present?
MF: U.S. intervention takes place in so many different ways. Both seasons of the podcast look at the different ways the United States pushes its agenda abroad—sometimes through direct military action, like the 1989 invasion of Panama, when U.S. troops entered the country and effectively kidnapped Manuel Noriega. And now in 2026 we’re seeing something similar in Venezuela. You’re talking about actual U.S. military intervention abroad.
We’re also seeing intervention right now in places like Mexico, where the United States hasn’t sent in boots on the ground just yet, but we know U.S. military intelligence supported the Mexican military’s raid on [the drug trafficker] El Mencho earlier this year, which then triggered a spike in violence across the country.
But there were also the proxy wars, where the United States backed authoritarian governments or trained and funded forces like the Contras in Nicaragua. And a future season is going to focus on Plan Condor, which was very much supported by the United States through its backing of South American dictatorships in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.
It happens in a lot of different ways. What we’re seeing right now feels like a return to something older—a kind of Teddy Roosevelt–style big-stick diplomacy that the United States used in the early part of the 20th century.
BG: When you released the first season, the Monroe Doctrine seemed like something from another era. But now policymakers are openly invoking it again. How did that shift shape the direction of the podcast?
MF: When I finished Season One, which focused on the U.S. wars in Central America in the 1980s, the Monroe Doctrine felt like something that was kind of “over there.” It was the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, and there were actually members of Congress talking about how to do away with it.
Then suddenly Trump comes in. I was shocked when he released his national security strategy in December 2025, because it not only talks about the Monroe Doctrine, but about the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—which they’re now calling the “Donroe Doctrine.” Nobody who’s not a historian would know what a corollary even is or why he’s mentioning it, but that’s clearly a nod back to the Roosevelt Corollary, which put Monroe on steroids. It basically said the United States would act as an international police force and do it with impunity wherever it wanted to, because it was allowed to according to the Monroe Doctrine. And Latin America is front and center in that strategy. It’s about power. It’s about military force.
So part of what I’ve tried to do with this podcast is talk about what’s happening now and bring listeners to these places, but also root it in a deeper analysis of the past to understand what’s guiding Trump as he’s threatening almost every country in the region except his allies.
BG: During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin America was justified as a fight against communism. Today it is framed in terms of the drug war, cartels, or “narco-terrorism.” How should we understand that shift?
MF: There was an interesting transition from the Cold War “battle against communism” that clearly happens in 1989 with the invasion of Panama. The United States always needs an excuse to act, right? So as soon as the Berlin Wall falls, it’s not by accident that George H. W. Bush decides to invade Panama. That was within a month of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Basically, the Cold War is over and the United States needs a new excuse to exert its force in the region. And of course, that became the drug war.
They’d already been working in that direction. In the episode I just released about Mexico [“Trump Re-Ups the Forever Drug War—How U.S. Policy Fueled Mexico’s Cartel Crisis”], I talked with longtime Naclista Christy Thornton, who pointed out that the United States was already ramping up the language of drugs and cartels back in the 1980s. Even then, the “war on drugs” functioned as a proxy for battling guerrilla movements. Then the transition becomes complete after 1989.
The U.S. invasion of Panama was disastrous. We’re talking about 20,000 homes burned, hundreds of people killed, the occupation of Panama by U.S. soldiers, and the kidnapping of Manuel Noriega. This was all done under the guise of drug trafficking, even though he had been a CIA asset for years. That was actually the last unilateral U.S. military action in Latin America until Trump’s boat strikes last year and the U.S. invasion of Venezuela. During the decades in between when the United States was pushing the drug war, whether through Plan Colombia or the Mérida Initiative in Mexico, or backing and supporting local militaries, the United States was acting in coordination with local governments. It wasn’t acting unilaterally. That lasted for four decades. And then Trump threw that all out the window.
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Bret Gustafson is a NACLA co-executive editor and the author of Bolivia in the Age of Gas.