Ep. 3: Venezuela After Maduro: Pink Tide, U.S. Intervention, and Pan-American Identity

Did the promise of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela fail? How do we feel about the U.S. Special Forces' removal of Nicolas Maduro in early January 2026? In this episode of El Speakeasy, the hosts examine Venezuela after Maduro — from the rise of the Pink Tide and Chávez’s oil-fueled revolution to renewed U.S. intervention and shifting sanctions. As they debate whether Maduro’s removal represents liberation or imperial overreach, they revisit Germán Arciniegas’s critique that Latin America has long been treated as background rather than co-author of history — spoken about, rather than listened to — and ask whether that dynamic still shapes hemispheric politics today. Ultimately, the conversation circles back to Latin American identity for all three hosts and how they navigate that identity in their personal and professional lives.

• Latin America: A Cultural History (in Spanish the book is called El Continente de los Siete Colores) written by German Arciniegas presents a nuanced and sometimes critical vision of the relationship between the United States and Latin America. His argument for a kinship and a need for closer ties is not based on a simplistic notion of similarity, but on a shared revolutionary origin and a common, unfinished project of New World democracy.
• Los amigos cite the blog Los Relojes del Chavismo, the take a quiz on Good Neighbor Policies, discuss a famous speech by Hugo Chavez, and remember an Oliver Stone film.
• Bill Kelley Jr. recently read Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin , a novel about a depressed agricultural engineer who slowly abandons his career and wonders through Paris and Normandy while reflecting on the failure of the EU, his own relationships and the collapse of his own desires. His medicated numbness becomes a bleak lens on a society – and man – sliding toward quiet ruin.
• Juan Devis has been busy reading The Fire Is Upon Us by Nicholas Buccola: the book traces the explosive 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., using it as a lens to explore the clash between Black freedom struggles and conservative resistance in the U.S.. Buccola weaves biography, history and political theory to show how their confrontation still shapes America’s ongoing battle over race, power, and the meaning of democracy.
• Francisco Ortega has been obsessed with the book Here and Now, co-written by Paul Auster and JM Coetzee. Here and Now is an intimate, years-long correspondence in which both writers wrestle with friendship, art, politics, aging, and the strange moral weather of the twenty-first century. Their letters become a quiet meditation on how two brilliant, very different minds try to stay honest, humane, and attentive to the world and each other in a time of accelerating uncertainty.