Today, we look at Radio Venceremos — a grassroots guerrilla radio that broadcast throughout El Salvador’s Civil War, denounced violent state repression, and inspired a nation.
In this episode, Michael Fox travels to San Salvador, where he visits the Museum of Word and Image, the home of the archives of Radio Venceremos. He hears from former members of the radio about the revolutionary project and the U.S. and Salvadoran military attempts to shut it down.
We look at what the museum means today, and also at its struggle to protect and preserve the past.
Under the Shadow is a new investigative-narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present. In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened: a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place Fox takes us to was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox, Under the Shadow is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America).
Click here to listen to all episodes of Under the Shadow.
Additional links:
Support journalist Michael Fox or Under the Shadow at https://www.patreon.com/mfox
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Guests: Carlos Henríquez Consalvi (“Santiago”)
Carlos Colorado
Lucio Vásquez (“Chiyo”)
Jorge E. Cuéllar
Michael Beattie
Karla Lara
Edited by Heather Gies and Maximillian Alvarez
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Theme music by Monte Perdido. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions
Chiyo and host Michael Fox performed two original songs that appear in this podcast. You can listen here and here.
You can read Chiyo’s book, Siete Gorriones, here https://www.academia.edu/43531929/Siete_Gorriones
Documentary sound and Radio Venceremos archives and images are courtesy of the Museum of Word and Image. You can visit them at https://museo.com.sv/ or follow on Instagram @museodelapalabraylaimagen and Twitter @tejiendomemoria.
Transcript
Michael Fox: Hi, I’m your host, Michael Fox. Before we get started, I think it’s important to say that many portions of today’s episode deal with some pretty harsh themes from El Salvador’s civil war. If you’re sensitive to these things, or you’re in the room with small children, you might want to consider another time to listen. OK. Here’s the show…
So, I’m standing on this residential street in central San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. Cars line the street on both sides. Parked cars. There’s schools that are just letting out their kids for lunch. And so this street is just always packed with parents picking up their kids, people waiting outside and whatnot.
It’s tree lined. It’s a beautiful day. Baby blue sky. It’s around noon. Nice cool breeze.
And just behind me is a big two-story building, pink, brown, with an image of Monsignor Romero that literally stretches from the ground all the way up to the top of the second story. Of course, he was the martyred priest that was killed by death squads in 1980 for telling security forces not to repress the population here.
And inside this building is the Museum of Word and Image, which is the reason why I’m here right now.
I walk into the museum. It’s a treasure trove of exhibits, paintings, and pictures packed into an old, converted two-story home.
During the week, it’s filled with the soft voices of groups or school tours that come to remember the country’s history or learn it for the first time. There’s a display of exclusive pictures of Monsignor Romero meeting people across El Salvador a few years before his death.
In the corner hang a row of faded beige shirts, the kind worn back in the 1930s by the country’s Indigenous and campesino farmers. It’s a display meant to honor the 1932 Indigenous uprising for better living and working conditions, and the massacre that followed.
It’s called, simply, “La Matanza”, the slaughter, and it all but wiped out the country’s Indigenous population in a matter of months — At least 30,000 people killed at the hands of government forces. This museum was one of the first to remember this dark, brutal period in El Salvador’s history, and to honor the victims.
There’s also a whole exhibit about the country’s celebrated 20th century writer, poet, and painter Salarrué. The revolutionary poet Roque Dalton. Another hall doubles as both a theater and a display of pictures and stories detailing the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on people’s lives.
The museum was founded 28 years ago with the dream of breathing life into the past. Rescatar la memoria historica — To rescue historical memory, as I mentioned in the last episode. To remember the victims of bloody, repressive regimes. To honor the revolutionary culture and the struggles of the past.
And nowhere is this displayed more powerfully than in the exhibit about El Salvador’s 12-year-long civil war and Radio Venceremos.
[Radio broadcast]
That was the rebel radio. Its name, Venceremos, means “We will overcome”. That sound you’re hearing is an actual broadcast from Radio Venceremos back in the day. The program was transmitted daily by the guerrillas throughout the entire war, from 1980 to 1992. Not an easy feat. The exhibit at the museum is a mock-up of what it looked and sounded like when the team was at the mic, broadcasting live.
So this room, they call it The Cave of Passion. La cueva de la pasiones. And it’s this built-in thing through the museum where it’s this 12 by maybe 20-foot cave where they used to transmit from Venceremos Radio. And they have it built into the side room in the museum where they talk about the entire radio and the history of the radio.
And then they have the actual equipment Radio Venceremos actually used, the old computer and this old transmitter they used to actually transmit.
Maybe the most powerful thing about this place is the fact that they literally have old programs from Radio Venceremos playing on the old tapes. They have them in the corners here, and it’s playing at all times. They’ve got this dim light in the middle to make it seem as though we’re actually in the cave itself.
It’s really well done. It’s impossible to state in words what this simple little radio meant for an entire country.
And not just the country, but the entire region.
[Under the Shadow theme music plays]
This is Under the Shadow — A new investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire.
I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: Invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.
In each episode in this series, I will take you to a location where something historic happened — A landmark in revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place I’m going to take you to was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
In the last episode, we looked at the tremendous US-backed state violence of El Salvador’s civil war, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent victims.
Today, we look at Radio Venceremos — A grassroots guerrilla radio that broadcasted throughout the conflict, denounced violent state repression, and inspired a nation.
This is Under the Shadow Season 1: Central America. Episode 5. “El Salvador Rebel Radio”.
[Music]
So, I first traveled to El Salvador back in 2004. I was there as an observer in that year’s presidential elections. I was a young journalist, particularly interested in community radio. That’s how I discovered the Museum of Word and Image.
And after I broke my arm in a tractor-trailer accident — Which is clearly a story for another day — I decided to stay in San Salvador and volunteer at the museum for several months.
I translated, I subtitled old videos into English, cut my teeth on Final Cut Pro. I listened, heard stories, and learned so much. I guess you could almost say that my work at the museum then planted the seeds that, today, have grown into the podcast you’re listening to now.
A lot of the people you’ll be meeting today are folks I’ve known for a long time. People I’ve worked with. People I respect.
Like this guy.
Santiago: Well, my name is Carlos Enrique Consalvi, better known as Santiago. That was my nome de guerre during the war. Only my mom called me Carlos.
Michael Fox: Since Santiago appears often in this episode, we’ve asked a voice actor to play his part in English.
Santiago is the founder and director of the Museum of Word and Image, and he was one of the founders of Radio Venceremos back in the day.
We sit in his office in the back of the museum. The air conditioner hums. He wears a crisp white shirt that matches his white hair and cleanly trimmed beard. He’s a journalist by trade. Venezuelan by birth. He came to El Salvador via Nicaragua in 1980.
Santiago: When I looked around at any of the countries in Latin America, we were all in a situation of oppression, lack of freedoms, lack of freedom of speech, military dictatorships. And like many journalism students, I asked myself, what kind of journalism can I do in this context of dictatorship? And so I decided to use my skills to take down dictatorships [laughs].
Michael Fox: He says when they started Radio Venceremos, it was a little like David and Goliath.
Santiago: We faced one of the most powerful governments in the world, which was the Reagan government. And we were fighting a grassroots struggle of campesinos in a country without jungle. And we faced an entire military apparatus, technology, and a whole political structure, including to hide the human rights violations that were happening here.
[Music]
Michael Fox: We heard about the US support for the brutal Salvadoran government of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in the last episode. The human rights violations. The killings. The massacres. The US-trained death squads. I won’t dive into all that again here, but if you haven’t listened to the last episode yet, I recommend that you do.
All this violence spurred groups across El Salvador to pick up arms, and it was the impetus for the creation of Radio Venceremos.
Radio Venceremos was an hour-long daily radio program transmitted live from rebel forces in the hills of Morazan. That’s a department, or state, in northeastern El Salvador that was largely occupied and held by the FMLN guerrilla forces throughout the war.
The underground rebel radio had teams that would head into the field with big old cassette recorders. They’d interview people about daily life, government attacks, violence, and the widespread human rights violations. You might call it the epitome of grassroots guerilla journalism.
As I mentioned in the last episode, it was the first outlet to report on the El Mozote massacre, where a US-trained battalion killed nearly 1,000 civilians, mostly children. Radio Venceremos interviewed a key witness, long believed to be the sole survivor, just two weeks later.
And Radio Venceremos wasn’t just propaganda, or news, for that matter.
Santiago: We did cultural programming, too. A series about the history of social struggles in El Salvador or about the Indigenous insurrection of 1932.
At one point, we had been receiving a lot of intelligence about the internal situation and the North American Ambassador and groups of the Salvadoran army. So we thought the best way to use our intelligence would be to create a comedy program, to share the information and to make fun of the members of the military high command.
So we gave them nicknames, like Trumpet-nose Chucho or Baby Doll Mendez. And the names stuck, across the country.
We stayed up all night long writing stories. We were very creative.
Michael Fox: They also had a team that would listen to the international news each day, write down the most important stories, and share them on air.
Among those on the team was this guy.
That’s Lucio Vásquez, better known as Chiyo. Remember, we met him in the last episode. He was the young boy whose two brothers, mother, and sister were killed by the military in the repressive violence just before the start of the war in 1980. His family fled to the hills. But they got separated.
Chiyo says he found his way to a guerrilla camp, where there was a school for orphans or children separated from their parents.
That’s him, as a young boy, in a documentary film about the war. He’s kind of hidden in the shadow of a classroom full of kids as he tells the story of how the military killed his mother and sister.
In the camp, he learned to read and write. By the time he was 12, he was holding a gun and had joined the ranks of those in battle. War, of course, was a terrible place for children, no matter where they were.
Like with Santiago, in this episode, we’ve asked for some help from a voice actor to play Chiyo, because we’ll be hearing from him often.
Chiyo: It was really hard, because you see a friend who has lost a leg, and a friend who has lost an arm. Another friend you have to bury because they have been killed. It’s really intense because the person you’re joking around with today, tomorrow morning they tell you they’d been killed in combat. And you know that you might be next. And it’s the same reality on the other side.
[Music]
Michael Fox: Chiyo was eventually assigned to Radio Venceremos, where he joined the news team following the major stories.
Chiyo: It was an amazing experience. We monitored the radios by candlelight: BBC, Spanish News Service, The Voice of America. We monitored Honduran news, all of the radio stations of El Salvador. What everyone was saying over shortwave. What they were saying about the buildup of troops here. What the US president was saying.
Michael Fox: And remember, they were doing this in the middle of a war, often as bombs fell around them.
They stayed on the move, and it wasn’t easy. Broadcasting a radio show required equipment. And particularly back in those days, that equipment was heavy.
Chiyo: It was a portable radio station, and a radio station where the combatants walked with the car battery on our backs, and the little power generators, microphones, cables, notebooks, this cassette, this mixer, all those things. And you had to carry them all by hand or in your backpack.
Michael Fox: They were constantly evading the military.
Chiyo: And when there were attacks, we had to grab everything and move so they couldn’t identify where we were.
Michael Fox: And the attacks happened often.
Both the Salvadoran and US governments became obsessed with destroying Radio Venceremos. And they got really sophisticated about detecting their location. The radio, of course, had its own methods of responding.
Here’s the founder, Santiago, talking about having a target on their backs during a community talk that was posted on YouTube about a decade ago.
Santiago: The year is October 1984. The US Congress is discussing if they’ll give more military support to the Salvadorian war. The low-intensity war — Which, for us, isn’t low-intensity at all — It’s a really bad image for the Reagan administration.
Many sections of the country are under control of the revolutionary forces. Despite the $1 million dollars a day coming in from the United States, they can’t control the insurgency. US-trained Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa tells a journalist that while Radio Venceremos is transmitting, it’s like having a scorpion up your butt [laughs].
That’s because the radio really screwed with them. Reagan said that the insurgency was defeated and on the run, but the existence of the radio showed the opposite. Interviewing the vice minister of defense after his helicopter crashed. Interviewing prisoners of war. Showing the advance of the revolutionary controlled territories. The collective farms. El poder popular, the grassroots power.
Jorge Cuellar: Radio Venceremos was, in some ways, instrumental to the consciousness-raising of the rural poor. People who had been left out of formal education who had no access to reading skills and literacy.
Michael Fox: Jorge Cuellar is associate professor of Latin American Studies at Dartmouth University. We heard from him often in the last episode.
Jorge Cuellar: Radio Venceremos becomes a repeater of ideas and of critiques of the Salvadoran state, of the US government. Also just revolutionary news and news of victories and political mobilizations throughout the region in order to tell people, this is what’s happening around you.
Michael Fox: it wasn’t just heard inside El Salvador.
Karla Lara is a Honduran journalist and singer who did support work for the radio in several countries when she was younger.
Karla Lara: Radio Venceremos has such an incredible story. My mom in Honduras used to listen on shortwave. And she said that it was so powerful. Marvelous.
Michael Fox: And it was.
Chiyo.
Chiyo: Radio Venceremos lifted the morale of the combatants and the civil population that listened in the capital and in the countryside.
Michael Fox: Chiyo says he even knows some former soldiers who listened to Radio Venceremos.
Chiyo: They said they had to listen at a really low volume because, if their commanders knew, they could be shot. So they listened in little groups.
Michael Fox: He says the radio destroyed the morale of the Salvadoran troops.
Chiyo: The army officials recognized that many soldiers laid down their weapons because Radio Venceremos spread this message: Brother soldiers, we come from the same place. And in times of battle, turn yourself in. The guerrillas have been instructed to respect your life.
So if you hear that as a soldier, when you are in a battle and they are encircling you, and you think they’re going to respect your life, the best thing you can do is lay down your weapons. And they did.
Michael Fox: That is how important the radio was.
And it gained a tremendous reputation. It was one of the main sources of on-the-ground news from El Salvador for the international press.
For example, if you search Google for The Washington Post’s archives from that time, you’ll find a ton of articles citing Radio Venceremos. The rebel radio was named the official voice of the FMLN guerrilla movement.
Chiyo: Can you imagine the level of credibility? International outlets picked up our reports. We didn’t just make stuff up.
And at the time, there were only two truths: The government line and the revolutionary discourse. And Radio Venceremos had a lot of credibility.
Michael Fox: It did.
[Music]
Michael Beattie: I can tell you, yeah, I did listen to Radio Venceremos. We all had transistor radios back then and the years before the Internet. And yeah, I’d go home to my hotel room, and we’d listen to their side of the story.
Michael Fox: Michael Beattie is a former journalist who spent several weeks in the mid-80s reporting from El Salvador for a number of US public radio networks.
Michael Beattie: This idea of press impartiality was fully expressed in El Salvador. We all knew who the bad guys were, there was no doubt about that. It was no doubt that it was the military, that it was Roberto D’Aubuisson who ran the death squads, as mostly military people in their spare time going out and murdering people on their own.
So they were all related to the military. We all knew that. You could feel that when you were around them. But we had to report it like, oh, well, you know, these communist rebels are doing this, that and the other, and there’s a military trying to keep order. So you have to look at it as, Jesus Christ, I’m here on the ground and it’s clear who the bad guys are. But you could never fully express that.
Michael Fox: Radio Venceremos could.
Chiyo: That’s what the gringos and the Salvadoran state and the elites couldn’t stand. That a radio like this would have so much international credibility. They couldn’t stand it. It was a slap in the face of the army that, in a country so small, with a military so large, the guerrilla had a clandestine radio.
Michael Fox: That is why the US and the Salvadoran governments decided it had to go.
That in a minute
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Michael Fox: The US government and the Salvadoran army funneled substantial money and resources to targeting and destroying Radio Venceremos. The United States stationed a boat in the Gulf of Fonseca, off the coast of El Salvador, so they could triangulate the exact location from where the radio was broadcasting. That was both so they could seek and destroy, and also so they could create interference.
They precision bombed. And got close.
Chiyo: They were really precise because they detected where we were. And they bombed close, and some of our friends, our companions, were killed.
Michael Fox: Chiyo says the military sent in elite troops by air and by land. Helicopter battalions. Five or six groups, all looking for the radio.
Chiyo: The international solidarity was amazing. Sending new transmitters when the old ones broke. The local population helped with gasoline for the generator. We had to dig holes so you couldn’t hear the motor from far away, and so they couldn’t detect Radio Venceremos easily.
Michael Fox: It was a battle, but it was also a game of cat and mouse. When the military began precision bombing, the Radio Venceremos team began to use an innovative network of barbed wire as if it were a telephone wire to send their live show to broadcast miles away from where they were actually located. Former Radio Venceremos technicians say it took military officials years to figure out how they were doing it.
Chiyo: It made the soldiers even crazier.
Michael Fox: It particularly rattled Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa. Remember, he was the military official, trained by the United States at the School of the Americas, who likened the radio to a scorpion. He was in charge of all military operations in Eastern El Salvador. In 1981, as the head of the elite Atlacatl Battalion, he oversaw the massacre at El Mozote, as we discussed in the last episode.
And he was charged with ridding the country of Radio Venceremos. But he became so obsessed with destroying the radio that he missed the trojan horse that would cost him his life.
After raiding a guerrilla camp, Monterrosa captured what he believed to be the infamous radio. But it was a decoy. The guerrilla forces had loaded it with explosives.
When he packed it into his helicopter and took off for base, the rebels ignited the charges from afar. He was killed alongside at least two other key field officers. “This is a major setback for El Salvador,” a US Embassy official told The Washington Post.
Chiyo: Radio Venceremos was a scorpion in their butt, and they could never destroy it. Although we lost compañeros defending it, we defended it with our lives.
[Music]
Michael Fox: Back at the Museum of Word and Image, Santiago shows me something most visitors won’t see. I follow him outside, around the building, across a little courtyard, and into a side room.
Wow. Increible.
It’s the entire archive of Radio Venceremos broadcasts. Rows and rows of old 90-minute cassette tapes in a rusty metal cabinet organized by month and year. Each tape is labeled “Radio Venceremos”, with the date, time and number of the broadcast. For a guerrilla radio program that was often fleeing the military and under bombardment, it’s remarkable this archive still exists.
Wow. Increible. These are all the tapes for Radio Venceremos, the Guerrilla radio that Santiago ran for… 20 years.
I ask him how he was able to keep a copy of every show despite being in the middle of a war. He says that he would send the tapes with a messenger, who would carry them to the Salvadoran city of La Union, where they would courier them on a ship to Nicaragua.
Remember, in Nicaragua, the leftist Sandinista guerrillas had overthrown dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. So Radio Venceremos had supporters and a friendly government there.
Of course, Santiago says, not all of the tapes made it. Some boats sank. Some were lost.
This archive is what remains of the originals.
Santiago explains that they’re moving the tapes to a different room in the museum archive. There’s a good reason for that.
In the corner of this room is a muddled mass of metal and old film roll that’s literally turned to liquid. The room has a sick smell. You can only go in there wearing a mask. The problem is that old film reels were made of nitrate or nitrocellulose. Those materials melt with time, heat, and humidity. That deterioration destroys the film. The substance is also toxic, flammable, and it can contaminate other tapes and reels as well.
The Radio Venceremos broadcasts are not the only tapes the museum has in its archive. There are also videos, documentaries, and old news reels, recorded on almost every type of videotape imaginable. But they are all in a race against time.
I want to bring in Carlos Colorado. He’s in charge of the museum archive: Digitizing it, protecting it. Trying to save what he can before these analog records of history dissolve in front of his eyes. He has slicked-back hair, dark-rimmed glasses, a goatee. And today, he’s wearing a green and pink Hawaiian shirt. He has a warm smile, and he exudes a patience that only someone in his position could have.
Carlos gives me a tour of the rest of the archive. It’s another side room, covered from floor to ceiling with shelves of old tapes — Beta-CAM, VHS, mini-DV, film. Just to give you an idea, for those listening who grew up in the 1980s or 90s, imagine if your local Erols or Blockbuster Video had a secret vault with home movies and newsreels of revolutionary movements. This is kinda what it would look like.
Carlos Colorado: This is the archive of the Radio Venceremos system.
Michael Fox: The archive is full of stuff like this. In fact, you’ve heard the sound from several of the documentaries throughout this and the last episode.
Carlos explains that when journalists came to cover the insurgent movements in El Salvador and Central America, they left copies of their work. Many of their videos are in the collection here.
Carlos Colorado: Others are in Nicaragua or Mexico, or in Germany with the solidarity committees.
Michael Fox: We walk through the rows of tapes. Carlos explains the painstaking, herculean nature of his job, cataloging, preserving, and protecting the contents. And he hasn’t even been able to see everything here.
Carlos Colorado: Maybe 30% of this I have seen, logged, and digitized.
Michael Fox: The Radio Venceremos broadcasts back in the other room were the priority. Those have already been digitized, thankfully. But there’s a lot of material left to go through.
I ask Carlos how he feels being the first person to see some of these things in like 40 years.
Carlos Colorado: In the beginning, I felt like a historian, seeing information that no one else has seen. I felt really privileged.
But if the archives aren’t returned to the community, they have no historic value. They are here waiting for something to happen to them. There are many stories that should be returned to the communities, many people in these videos who left the country or died in combat. And in a way, this is a way to do reparations for their relatives who were killed, for the family members today.
Michael Fox: That’s the thing, isn’t it? These tapes only serve so much good here, on a shelf, waiting to maybe be digitized, or for a researcher to find them, or to simply fall apart. The thing that sets this museum apart is that its goal is not only to bring people in, but also to go out into the community. To carry the message forward, as hard and as painstaking as that task seems.
Carlos Colorado: I think we are the only ones who are doing this type of thing. Being a sort of museum and archive.
Some investigators from France came here recently. They were doing research about archives in Central America. And they said we were special, because we have collections — Movies, photography, audio, but they’re not private. We are trying to return them to the community with an educational component. With talks, books, and expositions. We try to use the archive to create a dialogue.
But that’s easier said than done.
Michael Fox: I ask him what their greatest challenge is.
Carlos Colorado: Years ago, Santiago said we should rescue the most historic tapes. But at this point, that doesn’t matter. We just have to try and save what we can.
And today, everything from the 1980s is in really bad shape. We have miniDV tapes, but some of them are so old and busted that if you put them into the tape player, they destroy the machine. It’s really crazy if you think about it.
It’s a battle to save anything analog. It’s a battle to preserve the past.
Michael Fox: How does it feel to be in charge of preserving, while running against time? I ask.
Carlos Colorado: It’s a privilege and also a frustration. A big responsibility, because there is certain information for communities and families. So many testimonies, so many tapes here. These could be really important for people who still value this and are looking for some type of restorative justice for their family members who are no longer.
Michael Fox: It is not easy, but they’re doing everything they can to safeguard the archive and preserve historical memory. Rescuing and remembering the past — That’s the very essence of the museum’s existence.
Santiago: The museum is a song to the struggle of fighting against the forgotten. All of what we learned from the war can help us build the future.
Michael Fox: They are not the only ones struggling for memory. In the next episode, we go to 1980s Honduras, the major base of operations for US intervention in Central America. US-backed death squads are spreading terror, operating at will. And a group of family members of the detained and disappeared are fighting back.
That is next time on Under the Shadow.
Before I go, I wanted to let you know that if you’re interested in Chiyo’s story, he wrote a memoir several years ago. It’s called Siete Gorriones. If you read Spanish, I highly recommend you check it out. You’ve also heard some of his music in this and the last episode. I’ll add a link to a song or two in the show notes, as well as to the website of the Museum of Word and Image.
Also, you can find pictures of the Museum plus the Radio Venceremos archive on my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There, you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America.
Under the Shadow is co-produced in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. This is Michael Fox. As always, many thanks.
See you next time.
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