Traci Allaway

Yes, he seemed to enjoy getting access to a lot of oil from Venezuela.

And I guess the thinking is perhaps he tried to repeat that in Iran with so far varying degrees of success.

Yes, I'm being facetious.

Well, the other reason that Latin America is really interesting at the moment is because the Trump administration has basically said that after they're done with Iran in whatever way they're envisioning, Cuba is sort of next in their sights, right?

And we know that Cuba has been struggling because of high oil prices.

I think we touched on it a little bit when we did some of our Venezuela episodes.

But there's definitely a lot to talk about in terms of that region and what's going on with America and the war in Iran.

The golden age of blogging.

What does it mean to actually be a Latin America expert?

Because this is one of the things I struggle with whenever we do and we don't do them that often.

But when we do these Latin American episodes, it's very tempting to talk about the region as like this monolith.

And I wonder, is there an actual through line that you can identify through all these different countries?

Or what does it actually mean to say you are an expert on this particular very large region?

So when the U.S.

went into Venezuela, how did that end up, I guess, affecting some of these previous Trump alliances or existing Trump alliances?

How did leaders actually react to that?

OK, so if we fast forward to today, April 7th, have things changed in terms of the perception of the Trump administration in Latin America, given the situation in Iran where higher oil prices would be expected to push up prices for a lot of Latin American countries?

And again, I realize I'm not talking about a block of, you know, completely similar countries.

Some of them are oil exporters.

Some of them are importers.