Foreign Correspondence VIII

Nexos's NAFTA podcast is live!

Friends, guess what? My nexos comrades and I just published the latest installment of the project that has consumed a substantial part of our waking hours for the past year and a half: a six-episode narrative podcast on the history of the North American Free Trade Agreement. I’m afraid that La invención de América del Norte (do you sense a theme here?) is in Spanish, but I know that a not-inconsiderable portion of you are familiar with our sonorous Castilian, so I figured I should share it with you.

This podcast is part of one of the most ambitious projects in the history of nexos. Over the course of the last year and a half, we conducted more than 30 hours of interviews with the Mexican protagonists of the drama, from former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari to the leaders of the left-wing opposition that mounted a heroic effort to stop this catastrophe on its tracks.

Since then, we’ve been exploring different ways to tell the story that emerges from the the negative space between their contradictory accounts of the origins of the treaty that shaped our continent—and also, as those of you who are idle or patient or deranged enough to have read my novel, my own life. Some of you may be familiar with the special issue of the magazine we published this January, on the 30th anniversary of the agreement. Now, you can hear the voices of our interlocutors—and you’ll soon be able to read the full transcriptions of the interviews in a free ebook we plan to publish later this month.

I’m so proud of the team that made this happen: my genius-colleagues at nexos, María Guillén, Julio González, Vita Dadoo Lomelí, and especially Valeria Villalobos, the narrator and mastermind of this podcast. I’m also thrilled to have worked with some of the best audio journalists in Mexico: our friends at Genuina Media, Iñigo Alegría and Sergio Audelo, as well as my brother Ricardo López Cordero (who also happens to be my co-host in the extracurricular podcast on the intellectual history of Mexico that we make in our spare time, Archivo General). The illustrations for each of the episodes are the work of the great Víctor Solís, who is responsible for nexos’s trademark cartoons.

I would love for their work to reach the largest possible audience. If you find time to listen and you like what you hear (or even if you don’t: we’re in the running for a bunch of prizes, and I’m told such things matter), could you please give it a 5 star rating, click the “follow” button, and share it with your networks? Ghastly self-promotion, I know! But then again—and to our great misfortune—nexos’s NAFTA Project has recently become more relevant than ever. The reelection of that North American Caligula has left many of us wondering about the future of the agreement. Our take, which you can hear at the end of the last episode, is that at this point it’s easier to imagine the end of the democracy than the end of free trade. But who knows?

That’s all for now, friends. To those of you who live in the US: please take care of yourselves ? You have all my solidarity. The enemy has never ceased to be victorious, but I hold on to the optimism of the will. Here’s hoping we can imagine a new North America. One where people, and not just capital, can cross borders at will. One where we can vote in the same elections and ensure the likes of Trump can never again take power. Not a North American Union. Not a North American Alliance. A North American Commune.

I remain, as always, Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

NMM