Hal Hodson

speaker

137 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 22 Jun

Hal Hodson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Kicking and screaming: protests at World Cup · 11 Jun 2026 podcast

That's right.

This is a heavily militarized police force that operates in Mexico, and there are about a hundred thousand forces deployed in order to keep the country secure.

But the Mexicans, they understand the logic that the gangs operate under, and so they are more worried about, for instance, a rogue terrorist attack or drones sort of crashing into stadiums or crashing into fans in stadiums.

They are more worried about quotidian security threats rather than the gangs attacking World Cup operations.

But even terrorism is more likely to be a problem in America than Mexico.

Mexico doesn't have much of a history of these so-called lone wolf terrorist attacks.

Part of the reason for that is that it's much easier to get weapons in America.

That is, after all, where the Mexican gangs get their weapons.

There's quite a few groups in Mexico who are planning to use the spectacle of the World Cup to further their own agendas.

The biggest group is Mexico's teachers, who say that they are not paid enough and have already blocked the road in Guadalajara to one of the main stadiums and say that they will do that all the way through to match day.

Another interest group is a group of

Activists, they're the family members of what Mexicans call the disappeared.

This is a group of 150,000 or so people who have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Really, what's happened to them is that they've either been killed or recruited by gangs.

And their family members are pressing the government to do more to figure out what happened to them.

And they are using the World Cup as a platform for publicity as well.

Yeah, it's a huge test for Mexico's president Claudia Scheinbaum, because it becomes a very public question whether or not Mexico is managing to maintain control over its own territory.

So Trump has been putting out there for months the idea that Claudia Scheinbaum is terrified of the gangs and that she can't even run her own country and that the gangsters run the country.

And so i any little incident during a World Cup, and you know it's quite

To get through a whole World Cup without some sort of incident is quite likely to be blown out of proportion and taken in the context of Donald Trump and the Americans saying that the Mexican government is not in control of its own country.

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