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Greg talks to Isabelle Minasian, who is an editor at Lookout Landing (a Seattle Mariners site), a contributor for La Vida Baseball and The Hardball Times. She wrote an article about the Caribbean Winter Leagues for the 2018 Hardball Times Annual, which is the topic of our conversation. Since we’re getting close to spring training, it seemed an opportune time to have my first podcast on baseball. It’s not focused just on politics, though immigration and the Venezuelan conflict are in there.

Greg talks about today’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans and connects it to the debate over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (altogether roughly one million people).

Greg talks to Christine Wade, Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Washington College. She studies Central America and recently published Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador and also the ninth edition of Latin American Politics and Development. The topic is Honduras and the aftermath of the November 2017 presidential election. We make every effort to end on some sort of high note, with mixed results.

Greg talks with Ana Isabel López García, who is Assistant Professor at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana and Visiting Research Fellow, German Institute of Global Affairs and Area Studies. She does research on Latin American democratization and political institutions. She recently published an article on corporatist organizations and political parties in Mexico in The Latin Americanist, and they discuss the dynamics of corporatism and democratization.

Greg talks with Harold Trinkunas, who is Senior Research Scholar and Associate Director at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Among other things, he’s done a lot of research on Venezuela, including a book on civil-military relations. Last week he gave testimony at a hearing for the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee about Venezuela, and that was the topic of our discussion.

Greg talks with Michelle Bonner, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria in Canada. She studies democratization and human rights in Latin America. We discuss the state response to mining protests. How does the ideological of the government matter? What is “dialogue”? What does this tell us about democracy and repression in Latin America?

Greg talks about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, as a sort of postscript to his appearance on WFAE’s Charlotte Talks on the same day. What are the chances of congressional action?

Greg talks with Steven Hyland, an assistant professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Wingate University. He specializes in modern Argentina and international migration. He has a new book coming out entitled More Argentine Than You: Arab-Speaking Immigrants in Argentina with University of New Mexico Press. They discuss Muslim immigration to Argentina how that fit with Peronism, and broader patterns across Latin America.

Greg talks with Mervyn Bain, who is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations and Head of School of Social Sciences at the University of Aberdeen. He has published extensively on the relationship between Russia and Cuba. They talk about the continued strength of that relationships, the role of the United States, and what the future might look like.

Greg talks with Hannah Dreier, who has just finished three years as Venezuela correspondent for The Associated Press. She is the recipient of the 2016 James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for her coverage of the Venezuelan crisis. In July she’ll join ProPublica and cover immigration. We discuss the challenges of being a reporter in Venezuela, the type of coverage that Americans see, and how different it is to be a foreign versus local reporter there.