Leonardo Rocha
speaker
43 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Leonardo Rocha’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's very strange that the whole roof collapsed in one go. That's what people are saying, that there is something wrong, because you might have bits of the roof collapsing, people running the other direction. The building was a 1970s building that began as a disco, as a nightclub, and then became a music event, you know, a venue later.
Es gab viele Leute online, Leute, die ich auf der lokalen TV sah, die Nachbarn, die sagten, was passiert ist, es gab ein Feuer da ein paar Jahre ago, ich weiß nicht, ob es strukturelle Schäden war, es gab Berichte von Wasserlösen.
And also because it was closed during the COVID pandemic, that when it reopened, it reopened with new infrastructure on the roof, air conditioning generators and that might have put a strain on the roof. It's been investigated and what witnesses said, survivors, is that they thought it was an earthquake. It felt like an earthquake, trembling and the whole thing came down on them.
There are dozens of people who are outside, they are praying, they are sharing pictures, asking for people to inform, is my husband, is my daughter, is my brother here or in some hospital.
So the rescue efforts are going on and we have to say that the Dominican Republic has a history of hurricanes and earthquakes and they have a very developed team, very well trained and very well equipped and they are doing all they can to find survivors.
In Peru and Lima mainly, the metropolitan area, it's a big city, millions of people there. What you have is mainly extortion. People saying that transport companies are forced to pay extortion money or protection money. Businesses have to pay basically to avoid violence. There's lots of kidnappings for ransom.
There have been brutal killings of young people, girls that are killed if their families don't pay ransom. So there's a bit of lawlessness on that side. If you go to Lima, you normally don't feel the violence like other cities in Latin America, like Rio, Sao Paulo, Caracas. But that's a problem that everyone talks about.
And also criminal gangs, the Tren de Aragua, this gang from Venezuela, they control some areas of Peru in terms of mining. And there's a lot of blame, of course. It's not all done by foreigners. And you had this incident with this very popular singer, Paulo Flores. He was killed.
And what he was saying before the killing was the government should do something about extortion against the music business. You went to play a gig somewhere, they demand that you pay money to local gangs.
I don't think so. I mean, Gina Boloati, she basically inherited power when her predecessor was impeached for trying a coup, for corruption. There was all sorts of scandals. Peru is very unstable and she is not hugely popular. What I think the government was forced to do here was to act... because there have been warnings and people criticize the government for not doing enough.
Apparently, the poorest are the ones suffering. They are also forced to pay extortion. The richest, they don't suffer in the same extent. I mean, it's a measure to put troopers out and to show people that the security will be enforced, but I don't know how effective that will be.
President Trump is determined to go ahead with his policies. All the measures that he has signed into law or some special decrees that he signed have been challenged in court and he's going ahead with them. I think he's very defiant and very determined here.
He's using a law from, I believe, from the 18th century about invasion of American borders to say that these foreign gangs are a threat to America in the same way that the foreign army was. He's gone ahead with it. And from day one, he's very determined about to, as he put it, stop the flow of mass migration.
Have to bear in mind also that his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is of a Cuban family from Florida. And he not only speaks Spanish fluently, but he's very aware of the situation in Latin America. And I think that's a priority of the Trump administration there.
It's for a couple of reasons. First, the president of El Salvador, Naibe Bukele, is a young right-wing politician, enthusiastic, very supportive of the Trump policies. He said he was willing to take them. The United States apparently agreed to pay $20,000 per prisoner per year for him to house them in El Salvador. And there's also another reason, is the fact that Venezuela has
has a socialist, a left-wing government that's been subjected to sanctions by the United States. So they're refusing to take their parties from the United States. There was a sort of good start between President Maduro and the Trump administration. But since then, the Trump administration has issued new sanctions against the Venezuelan government that they have stopped.
So what I see here is President Trump imposing his policies. He needs third countries to accept these migrants. And El Salvador is the only country that has agreed to accept convicted criminals or people accused of belonging to criminal gangs.
According to reports from Venezuela, some of them are members of a criminal gang, the most powerful criminal gang in Venezuela, Tren de Aragua, which was mentioned by President Trump. But others are just migrants who entered the country illegally or working there without the proper documentation. So they were being deported anyway.
I mean, it's part of the Trump administration mass migration program they've created. been arresting people, thousands of people, even a day, and deporting them. And the interesting situation is because over the past decade or so, you have almost 8 million Venezuelans left the country. Most of them went to neighboring countries, to Colombia, but many ended up in the United States.
But because Venezuela and the U.S., they don't have diplomatic relations yet, Venezuela refused so far to accept repatriation flights. So these Venezuelan migrants will probably be sent to a third country. It could be Mexico or El Salvador, a different country. And now, to the surprise of many people, they are going back to Venezuela.
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