Antonia Cereijido interviews former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo about his real life experience, which inspired the Oscar- nominated film Argentina, 1985. They discuss the relevance of the film today given that democracy is under attack in many parts of the world and the role of movies in helping to process painful and unspoken histories, which for both Moreno Ocampo and Cereijido are deeply personal.

Christopher Soto is a Salvadoran-American poet, activist and prison abolitionist. He is based in Los Angeles, but has remained tied to his parent’s home country. Throughout his life, Christopher has taken many trips to El Salvador, but during his most recent visit to the Central American country in the summer of 2022, things were very different: the country’s president Nayib Bukele had declared a state of exception to address rising homicide rates attributed to criminal gangs. More than 65,000 people have been arrested since then, many of them arbitrarily. On this episode of Latino USA, Christopher Soto takes us to El Salvador during a state of exception and we hear about the deep connections between the United States and El Salvador’s carceral culture, as well as the importance of poetry within the prison abolitionist movement.

Villano Antillano and Ana Macho are two Puerto Rican trans and non-binary musicians making waves in the music industry. In their latest projects, Villano Antillano’s debut album “Sustancia X” and Ana Macho’s “Realismo Magico,” both artists use elements of magical realism and science fiction to dream of queer and trans empowerment. In this intimate conversation, we hear the two artists bring some humor into the difficult realities of navigating a transphobic industry, and we dive deep into the sonic worlds of their latest albums.

This week Latino USA shares an episode of the USA v. García Luna podcast, from Futuro Investigates and Lemonada Media. Genaro García Luna’s trial is over, but Maria and Peniley’s investigative work is not. In this episode, they learn that a U.S. senator has requested the DEA and the FBI information on García Luna, including the names of the U.S. officials who vetted him. We listen to some of our series’ protagonists react to the guilty verdict, and Peniley digs into what’s next for García Luna. Finally, our hosts reflect on why the war on drugs was always unwinnable, and they get into some chisme, going behind the scenes of this series. To hear more of USA v. García Luna, head to futuroinvestigates.org.

For this week’s Latino USA, we’re bringing you an episode from the newly released podcast series from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios, La Brega, The Puerto Rican Experience in Eight Songs. By the end of the 1990s, merengue ruled supreme on the radio and TV in Puerto Rico, but the road to get there was long and complicated, coinciding with the growing Dominican population to the island and culminating in perhaps what was the pinnacle of its popularity and takeover in Puerto Rican music, at home and abroad: Elvis Crespo’s “Suavemente.” Journalist Ezequiel Rodríguez Andino shares the story of merengue’s ubiquity and how the shift from salsa to merengue brought to the surface serious class and racial tension that still remains today. You can subscribe to La Brega here.