Graham Finlay

speaker

481 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 17 Sep

Graham Finlay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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Today with David McCullagh · Trump-backed outsider wins Colombian presidential election · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

I mean, again, Fuhimori's coup was quite popular in 1992 because the situation was so dire.

Like the Colombian leaders, he was dealing with insurgency with some very violent Maoist rebels, the Shining Path and then Tupac Amaru and so forth.

And

You know, just if you're in these situations where state institutions are not functioning well, where organized crime groups, transnational organized crime groups are so sort of influential in day-to-day lives of people, people very often turn to sort of authoritarian figures.

And of course, if you're a powerful person, if you have land, if you have wealth, if you run a business, you know, you are betting in many cases that the authoritarian ruler is going to be better for your business.

They do cooperate fairly closely.

There's a bit of an awkward coalition here.

So the West, if you look at South America, the West Coast, the Pacific Coast, has largely gone over to right-wing governments, often very, very hard right-wing governments who are associated with either past or current violence in some ways.

And this includes Bolivia, which has until recently had sort of left-wing governments of the type I described.

Donald Trump has taken a very active hand in interfering with these elections, and that is part of the complaints Cepeda has in Colombia.

He had clashed with Gustavo Petro over the return of Colombian migrants to Colombia.

He's accused Petro of

of being a drug dealer.

And of course, we'll remember that his intervention to kidnap Nicolas Maduro and his wife was for drug enforcement reasons.

And we should also know that the US military is killing people on boats in both in the Caribbean and in the Eastern Pacific.

And so all of these people have been welded together in something Donald Trump calls the shield of Americas, a shield of the Americas, which is coincidentally where he sent Kristi Noem, the former secretary of Homeland Security, when he fired her.

And this is a very awkward military coalition against drug cartels, which justifies these kinds of extrajudicial killings in the Eastern Pacific and in the Caribbean.

but also wraps all these people into what Donald Trump sees as his team.

And he's called this sort of the Donro Doctrine after the Monroe Doctrine of the 1820s, where European powers were supposed to stay out of the Western Hemisphere.

Anyway, this is awkward for all these people, especially people who are less populist, like Kast in Chile or Paz in Bolivia,

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