Alexander Aviña on Trump’s new imperialism in Latin America.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and President Trump at the White House on April 6, 2026.(Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
CNN is reporting that the CIA has been actively engaged in assassination campaigns in Mexico targeting alleged members of drug cartels. While both the CIA and the Mexican government have denied these allegations, there is clear evidence of an escalating war in the country that destabilize the government. I spoke with Alexander Aviña, a historian at Arizona State University, about the CIA’s activities in the context of the Trump administration’s wider assertion of imperial dominance over the Western hemisphere.
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The late Jeffrey Epstein was friends with all sorts of elite figures in the US and many other countries. This extensive network is now sometimes described as “the Epstein class.” The question is, was this class held together merely by the opportunistic trading of favors or did it have a coherent worldview and agenda?
Branko Marcetic has written a series of articles in Jacobin that clarify this issue by looking at relationships Epstein had with the billionaire Peter Thiel and the political operative Steve Bannon.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.