BT Live: Police & ICE Terror | Mali Defends Sovereignty | South America Elections

BT Live! Join hosts Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra and special guests twice weekly for the breaking news that matters and the sharp left, anti-imperialist analysis you need to keep fighting.

38-year-old Corey Ruiz was shot and killed by police in Madison, Wisconsin last week, at the same time communities in Houston, Biddeford and across the US mourn – and organize in response to – the ICE killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s been green-lit to end TPS protections and deport roughly 350,000 Haitian immigrants, and Marco Rubio’s State Department’s blacklisting anyone left of Mussolini as a communist Cuban agent.

The timing of all of this isn’t a coincidence: What’s really behind this rise in state terror? Rachel Domond, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, joins the show to help connect the dots.

It’s inauguration day in Lima, and president-elect Keiko Fujimori is being sworn into office as Peru’s first woman president – with a far-right deregulatory agenda modeled explicitly on her dictator father’s – after claiming victory over leftist Roberto Sánchez in the second round of voting. Colombia is set to inaugurate Abelardo de la Espriella, celebrity defense lawyer to notorious corporate and violent criminals, as its next president on August 7. In Brazil, imprisoned right-wing coup orchestrator Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flavio has been confirmed as the Liberal Party’s challenger to Lula in that country’s presidential elections this fall. What do all of these characters have in common? Donald Trump’s endorsement. Stephanie Weatherbee of the International Peoples Assembly joins the show to discuss the rise of the far right in South America, the Donroe Doctrine and what this neoliberal revival means for the region’s peoples.

In the wake of new coordinated attacks by armed groups that hit a high-security prison near Mali’s besieged capital Bamako and set off days of clashes with government and Russian mercenary forces, the Trump administration is reportedly weighing military strikes ostensibly targeting the region’s al-Qaeda affiliate in Mali. Bracing for what could be the eighth armed intervention of Trump’s second term, we ask Nigerian investigative journalist David Hundeyin the million dollar question: Who’s really behind Mali’s spiraling crisis, and what would US intervention mean for the broader fight for sovereignty across the Sahel?