AT THE TURN of the millennium, I was at war – or as close to war as I had any right to be. A self-funded stringer with next to no experience, I was “embedded” – if that is not too grand a word for hanging out – with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in the Lacandon Jungle in the far east of Chiapas, where southern Mexico gives way to Guatemala.

Three months earlier, after the collapse of a business in the UK had narrowed my life options to bankruptcy, skedaddling or death, I flew to Mexico and took a bus south to Oaxaca. I had long hankered to write for a living and had, occasionally, been paid to do so – music, film and book reviews, plus Loreful Entries, my guide to British calendar customs for the Kent regional press – but my journalistic career remained as theoretical as a just God.

If I lacked experience, I had at least read the right books: B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with its Americans hunting gold in the mountains and the fugitive legend of its author, who had once been Ret Marut and later surfaced as Hal Croves, his own purported agent; Under the Volcano, in which Malcolm Lowry sends a former British consul to his drink-lit extinction beneath the shadow of Popocatépetl; and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, set during the persecution of priests in 1930s Mexico, where the state tries to destroy the Church and ends up criminalising mercy.

All fiction, naturally. That was the trouble. I had mistaken literary appetite for preparation. Still, there it was: ruin, exile, reinvention. I had no serious claim to a seat at the table, but I pulled up a chair all the same.

I talked up my credentials to anyone who would read or listen. After badgering a contact in Oaxaca past the point of courtesy, I somehow secured an invitation from the EZLN to La Garrucha, in the Tzeltal cañadas of the Selva Lacandona – Maya territory in the present tense, not the archaeological one. The instruction was simple: get to Ocosingo; someone will collect you.

The next problem was selling the access I had mendaciously acquired. I emailed The News in Mexico City, Narco News, In These Times, The Guardian foreign desk, even the Reuters and AP bureaux – anyone who might mistake proximity for qualification. I was going to be with the Zapatistas. Surely someone, somewhere, needed copy.

I got a few nibbles.

TO CLARIFY, I wasn’t ducking bullets in a pitched battle. What announced itself as a revolution had begun seven years earlier, on January 1, 1994, when the EZLN emerged from the Lacandon Jungle on the day NAFTA took effect. They seized towns including San Cristóbal de las Casas, Ocosingo and Las Margaritas. A trade agreement had been answered with a declaration of war.

The Zapatistas were protesting against land dispossession, Indigenous exclusion, poverty, authoritarian rule and the neoliberal future being imposed on them. For twelve days Chiapas burned bright enough for the world to look up: masked rebels, army counter-attacks, prisoners freed, land records destroyed, scattered bodies in Ocosingo. The dead were counted differently depending on who was counting, but Human Rights Watch later put the toll at more than 200 before President Carlos Salinas declared a unilateral ceasefire on January 12.

By 1996, the struggle had moved to San Andrés Larráinzar. There, the EZLN and Ernesto Zedillo’s federal government signed the Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture, the first substantial agreement in the Chiapas peace process. They were meant to turn one of the uprising’s core demands into law: that Mexico’s Indigenous peoples be recognised not merely as poor citizens requiring aid, but as peoples with collective rights, their own cultures, local forms of government, systems of justice and a measure of autonomy within the Mexican state.

COCOPA, the congressional peace commission, drafted a constitutional proposal to give effect to San Andrés. The EZLN accepted it; Zedillo’s government rejected it and produced its own version. The differences were not cosmetic. Indigenous autonomy was narrowed, territorial rights and access to natural resources were weakened, local justice was made conditional and collective rights were recast as powers to be recognised and regulated by the state.

As negotiations stalled, violence dispersed into the villages. In the northern Ch’ol zone – Tila, Sabanilla, Tumbalá, Salto de Agua, Yajalón – Paz y Justicia, a PRI-linked paramilitary group, operated with apparent impunity: roadblocks, expulsions, disappearances, sieges and the policing of who could safely leave or return. Around Chilón and Bachajón, Los Chinchulines, a hardline PRI-aligned group based in San Jerónimo Bachajón, turned politics into beatings, burned houses and murder. In Chenalhó, in the Tzotzil highlands, the violence was more intimate but no less political: hamlet against hamlet, neighbour against neighbour, families pushed from one refuge to the next.

In March 1997, state police attacked civilians sympathetic to the EZLN in San Pedro Nixtalucum, in El Bosque: four dead, dozens wounded or detained and three hundred displaced. By the end of November, as many as 4,500 Indigenous people had fled violence in Chenalhó, most of them Zapatista supporters or members of Las Abejas, a pacifist Catholic civil-society organisation that shared much of the Zapatista grievance but not the rifle. Then came Acteal: forty-five displaced Indigenous people, mostly women and children, murdered while praying, as Public Security Police stood nearby and did not intervene.

In 1998, security forces moved against a number of Zapatista autonomous municipalities: Ricardo Flores Magón at Taniperla; Tierra y Libertad at Amparo Agua Tinta; Nicolás Ruiz; and San Juan de la Libertad in El Bosque. In the last of those operations, on June 10, eight Indigenous civilians and two police officers were killed.

In 1999, the pressure intensified. Military and police incursions into Zapatista communities increased sharply: arbitrary detentions, checkpoint harassment and deployments that could run into the hundreds. In August, about 500 soldiers arrived in Amador Hernández, by ground and parachute, officially to protect surveyors measuring for a road the community opposed.

What remained in early 2001 was the residue of war: fear in its maintenance phase. Much of what happened in Chiapas never made it into a report. Communities were still denouncing pressure from soldiers, state police, paramilitaries and armed civilians: patrols restored, checkpoints reappearing, ejido land occupied, Zapatista support bases and peace camp observers threatened, shots fired at night to remind people who still had guns.

The new president, Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party, had been inaugurated in December 2000 after breaking the PRI’s seven-decade grip¹ on Mexico. A former Coca-Cola executive turned rancher-politician, he arrived promising democratic reform and a revival of the San Andrés Accords. But the Mexican state had many faces and only one of them had changed.

LA GARRUCHA was not the deep jungle of my imagination. It was a rebel community of tin roofs, mud roads, painted boards, maize fields and forested hills pressing in on either side. The green was not untouched wilderness but broken, worked and inhabited: milpa, pasture, second-growth mahogany, chicozapote and cedar. To get there from Ocosingo you passed the army barracks at Toniná, crossed towards the Río Jataté and kept going until the road surrendered to dirt. In the dry season the track rose in dust; in the rains it dissolved into ruts and brown water.

At night the forest was all talk and no show. Frogs, insects, the occasional horse shifting in the dark; then, from somewhere beyond the cleared land, the monstrous, phlegmy bellow of howler monkeys, half drainpipe, half demon. There were jaguars in the wider Selva Lacandona, tapirs, peccaries, spider monkeys, scarlet macaws, boas and nauyaca pit vipers, but they remained legend: gods I would happily have been sacrificed to see. The animal I saw most often was the revolutionary mutt: ribby, suspicious, asleep under a bench.

I was moved between Zapatista centres: Morelia, near Altamirano; Oventic, in the Tzotzil highlands; and Roberto Barrios, in the Ch’ol northern zone. More for my education than protection, I think. I interviewed commanders, visited schools and clinics, took my turns keeping watch and tagging along on general patrols, and talked with international observers and villagers who could identify the hired thugs who had threatened them that week. Xuno, the young man assigned to mind me, was shot the week after I arrived in one such confrontation. He reckoned the heavies worked for a mining company – in Chiapas every hole in the ground seemed to come with a rumour of precious metals attached.

We ate what there was: tortillas, beans, rice, coffee, plantain, oranges, tamales when someone had made them, eggs when they could be spared, chicken rarely; pozol in the heat; and, now and then, a sweaty bottle of Superior brought in from town for “nuestro corresponsal pedo” – “our drunken correspondent”. I was relieved to learn the third word meant inebriated and not, well, a friend of Jeffrey’s.

I had a couple of brief audiences with Subcomandante Marcos, the masked EZLN spokesman whom the outside world treated as the movement’s leader, though his title placed him beneath its Indigenous command. The Mexican state identified him as Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a former university lecturer. But Marcos’s true identity was the one he performed in public: balaclava, curved pipe, charisma.

I was charmed, as so many had been before me. Marcos was solicitous of my welfare, somehow satisfied that I had been thoroughly vetted and therefore happy for me to see all aspects of the organisation. He left me reading, too: Carlos Fuentes, the novelist; Carlos Monsiváis, the great chronicler of Mexican public life; and a Spanish-language collection of his own stories, Don Durito de la Lacandona. Durito was a recurring creature in Marcos’s communiqués: a beetle with glasses and a pipe, a miniature jungle Quixote, turning arguments about neoliberalism into comic allegory.

THE EZLN changed tack almost as soon as Fox took office. On December 2, 2000, it called for a national mobilisation to force Congress to recognise Indigenous rights and culture in the constitution, in the form of the COCOPA proposal. The commanders would not wait passively for Fox’s peace language to become policy. They would send a delegation to Mexico City at the end of February 2001, representing the peoples and communities of Zapatista Chiapas: Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Ch’ol, Zoque, Mame and mestizo.

This was the plan that became the Zapatour, though that was the press name: half rock tour, half insurgent pilgrimage. The EZLN called it the March of Indigenous Dignity, the March of the Colour of the Earth. By early February, the movement was answering questions through its website and email, and the answers revealed a considered strategy.

Fox had promised peace. The Zapatistas would ask what that meant once the promise had to pass through Congress, the army, the PAN, the PRI, the governors – the long digestive tract of the Mexican state. The delegation was not going to Mexico City as Fox’s guests. They were going as claimants. The demand was precise: pass COCOPA, honour San Andrés, recognise Indigenous autonomy, reopen the peace process. Anything less would show that the new democratic face still sat on the old body.

Since 1994, the Zapatistas had belonged, in the public imagination, to the jungle, the mask, the communiqué, the military cordon and the romance of clandestinity. Now they would leave Chiapas unarmed and take the argument by road to the capital. San Andrés could no longer be dismissed as a local dispute. If Congress was serious, it would have to turn the Accords into law.

I TRAVELLED to San Cristóbal de las Casas on February 14, ten days before the Zapatour’s formal send-off. The commanders were to gather there from Oventic, La Garrucha, La Realidad and Moisés Gandhi: twenty-four members of the Zapatista command, including Comandantas Esther, Susana, Yolanda and Fidelia; Comandantes David, Tacho, Zebedeo, Moisés and Javier; and Subcomandante Marcos. Supporters were told they could begin in Chiapas, join the caravan along the route or wait for it in Mexico City. It was a moving invitation: the rebellion leaving the hills and asking the country to walk beside it.

I de-jungled, staying at a posada run by the family of one of Xuno’s friends. After the mud, smoke, sweat and shared floors of the camps, San Cristóbal felt almost indecently luxurious. I wrote up my notes, tried to put names, places and dates into some order and spent long hours in cybercafés, filing colour copy and photographs whenever the connection held, nursing each attachment through as if it contained nuclear launch codes.

San Cristóbal sits at about 2,200 metres, high enough for cold nights and black wool jorongos. The town is painted in surgical pastels: skin-graft pinks, jaundice yellows, old-bruise blues and mint-condition greens; the red clay of the roofs darkening under mountain rain. Just outside town rises Huitepec, a volcanic dome carrying one of the last local scraps of the old central Chiapas cloud forest. It was a place to exhale, to let the body catch up with the delayed knowledge of how badly my overreaching might have gone. My broad smile had the fixed quality of a neurological event. I could not turn it off, even in the interests of politeness.

I spent a couple of days in the cloud forest. The light thickened as if caught in the canopy, the trees carrying whole gardens of moss and bromeliad, every bird call seeming to come through wet cloth. The forest released its birds in fragments: the single hoot – pure and full-toned – of a blue-throated motmot²; a mountain trogon glowing crimson like a floral fire; hummingbirds, gorgets of garnet and amethyst, flickering among fuchsia and passiflora blooms. Climbing higher, running low on water, I thought I heard a bearded screech owl, but by then I was lost, my senses blown, absurdly grateful to be admitted to the conference of wild things.

THE RALLY IN Plaza Catedral, expected in the afternoon, did not begin until ten, after delegates from La Garrucha were held up. By my estimate, close to fifteen thousand people had gathered in the square and the delay was beginning to tell: whistles, the odd skirmish and a vendor’s hot-dog shortage being taken personally. So far, so normal.

When Marcos and the twenty-three commanders came onto the stage, they were masked and black-clad, somehow made larger by the anonymity that was supposed to erase them. Beside them stood Fernando Yáñez, unmasked and named as the EZLN’s bridge to Congress. They sang the Mexican anthem and the Zapatista anthem. The national flag, the EZLN flag and the bastón de mando were passed from hand to hand, like objects being charged for the road.

By morning the ceremonial had become practical. The delegation left San Cristóbal in the beautiful disorder that became the Zapatour’s signature: masked delegates at the centre; supporters packed into buses; journalists, fixers and accredited press vehicles nosing for position; donated food in a support van; cars carrying Mexican and Italian deputies; Federal Preventive Police escorts, patrols and motorcycles. Enough excitement to power the thing all the way to Mexico City.

Moving through it all were the white-overalled Ya Basta! crew, who adopted me when my fellow journalists proved a sniffy, kvetching bunch, especially about what I had been doing for the previous six weeks. The Italians were part solidarity mission, part theatrical bodyguard, part anti-globalisation roadshow: disconcertingly brave, comic a and built for confrontation. They came from Italy’s autonomist far left, from the centri sociali that turned anti-capitalist politics into a theatre of disciplined obstruction. They put their bodies between the state and the people it wanted out of sight.

The first stop was Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital, where the caravan halted to salute supporters and someone, mistaking my foreign pallor for status, pressed a Simojovel puro cigar into my hand: dense, dark and already softening in the heat. Then we crossed into Oaxaca by way of Tapanatepec and La Ventosa – “the windy place” – where the Tehuano gap wind comes tearing across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Juchitán came later that day: the first major rally, the first overnight stop, the first proof that the march could leave Chiapas and arrive somewhere else as more than news. By then the convoy had acquired the air of a travelling circus, with people climbing down at stops and walking the final stretch into town, as if arrival had to be made bodily.

There, the Zapatour broke bread with the older political culture of the Isthmus: Zapotec organisers, students, musicians, poets and veterans of COCEI, the Coalition of Workers, Peasants and Students of the Isthmus, which had helped make Juchitán one of Mexico’s great centres of grassroots left politics. This was not merely another point on the itinerary, but a reception by the area’s Indigenous communities – Huave, Mixe, Mixtec, Chontal and Zoque, as well as Zapotec – some matrifocal, some radical, some both.

From Juchitán the caravan moved towards Oaxaca City, but that morning Yáñez announced that a death threat had been received overnight: a warning, as it was understood then, that the delegation would be met in Jalapa del Marqués by the Cortamortajas, reputed killers for hire with a name that, to an outsider’s ear, meant “shroud-cutters”. The EZLN called on those accompanying the convoy, and anyone along the route who could help, to investigate, while holding Fox’s government responsible for whatever might happen. So the road to Oaxaca acquired another layer. The caravan went anyway.

The danger did not materialise, but nobody behaved as if it had passed. There was a small crowd, police in civilian clothes, patrol cars held back from the federal road; everyone careful around the thing they all understood: that the march was vulnerable and that saying so too clearly might help summon the threat into being. After that, the road to Oaxaca City seemed to speed up. El Camarón, Matatlán, the Mitla crossing, Tlacolula de Matamoros and Santa María del Tule went by like flash cards, each place reduced to a name, a blur of faces and hurried blessings through the glass of the bus.

By the time the caravan reached Oaxaca City, thousands had been waiting for three hours in the Plaza de la Catedral and the Alameda de León. Red flags with hammer and sickle moved above the crowd, along with banners bearing the portraits of Marcos and Emiliano Zapata: the revolutionary of land restitution, murdered in 1919, whose war against the hacienda order had made him the patron saint of Mexico’s unrealised agrarian promise and in whose name the Zapatistas had risen.

Municipal authorities from the Mixtec community of Santiago Ixtayutla formally greeted the commanders. Speakers from Loxicha, Guelatao and the National Indigenous Congress took the microphone. Then the formalities gave way to testimony: Indigenous prisoners, militarised villages, language, land, municipal autonomy, the right not to be administered out of existence. The Zapatistas had arrived carrying one history of grievance; Oaxaca answered with another.

People wept as they spoke. They called out the names of their villages to be caught by the cameras and microphones, carried beyond the square like songs, changed in value by the act of being heard. No longer shorthand for remoteness, poverty, bad roads, bad schools or “Indian trouble”, those names became proof of existence, hard currency in the republic of attention.

The schedule was punishing because accumulation was the point. Every stop added witnesses and every witness altered the scale of the demand. On the morning of February 27, the convoy left Oaxaca before dawn, a strung-out column of buses, camionetas and cars blinking along the road like Christmas lights after a bad night’s sleep. The logistics were beginning to fray. Seven buses hired by Ya Basta! and the European solidarity network had disappeared in Oaxaca, along with their drivers. Governor José Murat’s people offered replacement buses with suspicious speed. The Italians refused the help rather than let the state insert itself into a march for autonomy.

In Tehuacán, Comandante Gustavo repeated what the EZLN required before any real dialogue could begin: the release of Zapatista prisoners, the army’s withdrawal from seven positions and constitutional recognition of Indigenous rights and culture through the COCOPA proposal. The mood, however, was bright: the rough camaraderie of the road in full flow, impassioned speakers, small plates of rice and beans passed hand to hand, cohetones cracking the air.

Then came Orizaba, which seemed to surprise everyone. An industrial city, not an obvious Zapatista stage, it nevertheless poured itself into the streets: families, children, cyclists, motorbikes, homemade signs, people leaning from bridges and roofs, the bus crawling through a crowd that kept thickening in number and noise. It was a city recognising itself in real time.

By Puebla that night, the march had become a phenomenon. The plaza was packed, the surrounding streets jammed, the city drawn into the gravity of the moment. Indigenous speakers from Puebla framed the Zapatista demand as their own, while Tacho, David, Zebedeo and Marcos returned again and again to the same point: COCOPA was not a favour to Chiapas but a national test.

Marcos also set out the next move. The march had reached the doors of the Valley of Mexico. From there it would draw a circle around power – through Tlaxcala, Hidalgo, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Michoacán and the State of Mexico, before closing in Zapata’s Morelos and entering the capital. The Zapatistas were not taking the shortest road to Congress. They were making the country assemble around them first.

ON MARCH 1, on the road from El Tephé towards Querétaro, near San Juan del Río, a bus in the caravan lost its brakes and careered into the vehicles ahead. It struck the Zapatista Information Centre camioneta, which in turn hit the rear of the bus carrying the commanders. A Federal Highway Police officer was killed; several others were injured. Was it incompetence, sabotage, a warning? The EZLN called off the day’s public events and spent the night in Querétaro. It would wait, it said, for expert reports before deciding whether the crash had been an accident or an attack.

After Querétaro, the caravan dipped into Guanajuato at Acámbaro, then entered Michoacán through Zinapécuaro and Morelia, moving on through the Purépecha lake-and-highland country of Pátzcuaro and Uruapan before reaching Nurío for the Third National Indigenous Congress.

There, briefly, the road ceased to be road and became forum. The Zapatour was no longer only the EZLN’s march. The Congress made its demand national and explicit: Indigenous peoples were asking to be recognised as peoples, not relics, wards or supplicants; to keep their lands, defend their territories, govern their communities and practise their own forms of law. The question was no longer whether Marcos could charm the country into listening. It was whether the country could hear its Indigenous peoples speaking in chorus.

From 2010, for the best part of three years, I was a drug-war correspondent, based for much of that time in Ciudad Juárez, then the murder capital of the world. Much of my work in Mexico since has been shadowed by cartel activity: who controls the road, who charges for safe passage, who skims the harvest, who decides which town may sleep and which must burn. I have largely resisted looking at this account of one of my earliest encounters with Mexico through the eyes of those later visits.

But Michoacán makes such restraint difficult. It is hard to pass through it now without hearing the past mourning the present. If Chiapas had been the state Mexico wanted to keep at the edge of the national story, Michoacán has become one of the places where the story now catches fire: avocados, timber and transport, precursor trafficking, a lime growers’ leader murdered, a mayor assassinated during Day of the Dead festivities in 2025, villages ringed by armed men, drones overhead, mines in the road, cartel names changing, new factions forming. It is an extortion state, not just drug territory.

After Nurío, the road turned colder and more solemn. The caravan pushed into the State of Mexico: Temoaya, Toluca, the Otomí Ceremonial Centre, altitude, pine air, stone. The closer we came to Mexico City, the more the march seemed to pull older sovereignties into view. Not survivals, not folklore, but Otomí, Matlatzinca, Mazahua: central highland peoples whose worlds had their own centres long before the republic drew its map.

The names were coming thick and fast now, and they mattered because they carried more than one history at once. In Morelos, south of Mexico City, Cuernavaca was the old Cuauhnáhuac, a Tlahuica city absorbed into the Mexica tribute system before the Spanish conquest. And Tepoztlán brought the old sacred geography into view: the temple of El Tepozteco above the town, the pulque god on the cliff, the Nahua world of altepetl, tribute and land that predated the republic.

This was Zapata country. Anenecuilco was his birthplace; Cuautla was the city where his forces helped defeat the Federal Army in 1911 and where his body was buried after his assassination in 1919. When it was announced that the delegation would leave Cuautla on March 8 following the route of Zapata towards Milpa Alta in the Federal District, the point was clear: the Zapatistas were part of an argument as old as conquest itself – who holds the land, who works it and who can be pushed off it.

At Cuautla, provocateurs along Avenida Reforma threw objects and fruit peel at the bus carrying the EZLN delegates. Every welcome had its counter-welcome, but this one came late enough in the march, and in front of enough cameras, to puncture the idea that the country had simply opened its arms to the Zapatour. Then came Milpa Alta and Xochimilco, the southern approach to the capital. The movement had become urban, but not domesticated. On March 11, the delegation transferred onto a Kenworth truck for the final approach to the Zócalo, the EZLN letters on the cab, the platform open, a banner along the side reading: “Never again a Mexico without us.”

THE CARAVAN reached the Zócalo on March 11, where more than 200,000 people filled the square. Victory was in the air, but the Zócalo was only the beginning of another campaign. The delegation stayed at Villa Olímpica and pushed for Congress to receive it. In the days that followed, it carried the case across Mexico City: to the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, the UAM and the UNAM; to meetings with rock musicians, rallies and negotiations; and to a “mini-Zapatour” of the southern pueblos.

Everything now hung on access and procedure: whether Congress would receive the commanders, whether they could speak masked from the tribune, whether Marcos would appear and whether the San Andrés/COCOPA proposal would survive the legislative process.

On March 28, the commanders entered the Chamber of Deputies. Marcos was not there. Comandanta Esther gave the central speech. She told Congress that Marcos was only a subcomandante, sent to bring the commanders there, and argued for constitutional recognition of Indigenous rights and culture.

A march can force a door open. It cannot make the state keep faith once the crowd has gone home. The promise had survived the road. Now it had to survive Congress.

ON APRIL 25, the Senate unanimously approved a constitutional reform on Indigenous rights. Three days later, the Chamber of Deputies approved the same altered text. To the myopic, it looked like victory. In law, it was defeat by amendment. The COCOPA initiative the EZLN had accepted and Fox had sent to Congress had been severed at the joints: autonomy, self-determination, legal standing for Indigenous communities, land, territory, natural resources, the election of authorities and the right to associate beyond the municipal cage. These were not technicalities. They were the parts that gave the law force.

For the Zapatistas, this was the betrayal the Zapatour had been intended to shame the state out of committing. On April 29, the EZLN formally refused to recognise the reform. It said the law did not take up the spirit of San Andrés, did not respect the COCOPA initiative, ignored the national and international demand for recognition of Indigenous rights and culture, sabotaged the tentative rapprochement with the government and made a negotiated solution to the war in Chiapas impossible. Then it broke off contact with the federal government.

The National Indigenous Congress rejected it. ANIPA – the Asamblea Nacional Indígena Plural por la Autonomía – called it “a doorway to war.” Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Hidalgo, among the states with the largest Indigenous populations, voted against it in the ratification process. Chiapas rejected it 30 to 5. Governor Pablo Salazar put the contradiction cleanly: those for whom the law had been created were largely rejecting it. That ought to have ended the matter morally, if not legally. Instead, the votes were counted: seventeen state congresses in favour, nine against. Enough for the Constitution. Not enough for justice.

There were people who said the reform was better than nothing. There always are. The Mexican Bishops’ Conference came close to that position, calling the law a basis for peace while conceding that it had deepened political tensions. Fox tapdanced, praising the Senate’s work, admitting the law’s limits, then tried to close the case by decree. By late May, from his ranch at San Cristóbal, he was saying the issue was “finished”. Peace, in other words, had been announced over the heads of the people still waiting at checkpoints and listening for gunfire.

Marcos renamed the “Indigenous rights bill” the “Constitutional Recognition of the Rights and Culture of Landowners and Racists”.

AFTER THAT, the Zapatistas largely withdrew from formal dialogue with the state. Their verdict was simple: congress had not legislated for them, but around them. From then on, the movement’s answer was not to ask for autonomy, but to build it in Chiapas. San Andrés left the chamber and returned to the villages, no longer as a promise to be honoured by the state, but as work to be done without it.

In 2003, the EZLN gave its autonomy a new civilian form: the Caracoles and the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, or Good Government Councils. The Caracoles replaced the old Aguascalientes as the public doors of Zapatista territory. The Juntas coordinated the autonomous municipalities, handled disputes, dealt with outsiders and oversaw the daily work of education, health, justice, women’s participation, local assemblies and land use. Rotating, anti-party, anti-clientelist, community-run and answerable downwards, not upwards, they were built in defiance of the habits of the Mexican state.

The system was never recognised by the state, but it functioned as a parallel Indigenous government. This was the period when the Zapatistas ceased to be a guerrilla army in any conventional sense and became something stranger and more durable: a territory-based experiment in self-rule, conducted under constant attrition. The army did not disappear from Chiapas. Paramilitary pressure continued. Government social programmes became another weapon in the long counterinsurgency, rewarding communities that accepted the state’s terms and isolating those that refused them.

By the 2010s, the EZLN no longer commanded the international spotlight as it had between 1994 and 2001. Marcos did not so much retire in 2014 as stage his own disappearance. After the murder of a Zapatista teacher known as Galeano, he announced that Subcomandante Marcos had been a constructed figure, a mask made for the media age and took the dead man’s name. It was a symbolic self-burial but also a reconfiguration: the magnetic spokesman killed off, the dead comrade carried forward, the movement retreating from spectacle into the trickier business of survival.

Zapatismo travelled well. It became a political language for anti-globalisation activists, Indigenous movements, feminists, autonomists and anti-capitalist networks far beyond Chiapas. Inside Chiapas, the work was more rigorous and less romantic: keeping communities intact while young people left, land was contested, state neglect persisted, government programmes divided villages and organised crime began to take up the old spaces of counterinsurgency.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidency made the old categories harder to use. He spoke the language of the poor, the south and the Indigenous, and his government presented itself as the first in decades to take Mexico’s abandoned regions seriously. But to the EZLN, the bargain had not changed. The Tren Maya, the Interoceanic Corridor, energy infrastructure, tourism projects, National Guard deployments and militarised territorial control: to the government, these were investments, shows of solidarity. To the Zapatistas et al, they were managed inclusion: money from above, land opened from outside, consent requested after the decision had been made.

In 2024, Mexico passed another major reform to Article 2, recognising Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples and communities as subjects of public law, with rights around consultation, cultural identity, legal standing, patrimony and participation. The government presented it as historic. At the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Mexico’s delegation described it as a landmark recognition of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican self-determination.

The sceptical view was that Mexico had finally recognised what San Andrés had demanded almost 30 years earlier, but in a country transformed by militarisation, megaprojects, organised crime and territorial pressure. The reform gave communities legal standing and administrative recognition. It did not answer the harder question of control: over land, resources, consultation, development and the right to refuse. One 2024 critique called it symbolic recognition, 30 years late. The state had refined the language. The ground had become more dangerous.

CHIAPAS HAD always been violent in the old counterinsurgency, paramilitary and land-conflict sense. By the 2020s, that violence had acquired another economy. The state had become a strategic criminal corridor: drugs, migrants, weapons, timber, fuel, local political control, routes through Guatemala and out towards the Pacific. Chiapas, once relatively untouched by this level of gang violence, had become a turf war zone between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).

In Tila, in June 2024, more than 4,000 people fled after armed men shot up the town and set fire to homes and businesses. Elsewhere it meant roadblocks, forced recruitment, disappearances, communities ordered to choose sides, shops taxed, harvests squeezed, people killed and whole villages emptied. By August 2024, the number of people displaced across Chiapas since the beginning of 2023 had reached at least 16,000, according to the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre. Thousands more were trapped behind cartel checkpoints.

In July 2024, more than 500 Mexicans fled south across the border into Guatemala to escape cartel violence in Chiapas. It was a grim reversal: Chiapas, once a refuge for Guatemalans fleeing genocide, was now sending its own people the other way. By 2025, human rights monitors were describing the state as a centre of forced displacement, territorial dispossession and political violence.

The murder of Father Marcelo Pérez in October 2024 became a kind of emblem. He was a Tzotzil priest and peace activist, long associated with Indigenous defence, mediation work and the painful civic labour of trying to keep communities from being swallowed by armed power. He was shot after Mass in San Cristóbal.

THE ZAPATISTAS were not defeated militarily. They were contained, marginalised, outlasted, copied, mythologised and then overtaken by a new regime of violence: less ideological, more lucrative and thus harder to negotiate with.

In November 2023, the EZLN announced the dissolution of its Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities and Good Government Councils, the public architecture of autonomy it had spent two decades building. The Caracoles would continue to serve local people, but close to outsiders. The Zapatistas cited waves of gang violence along the Chiapas-Guatemala border, though the communiqué did not reduce the decision to that single cause.

Zapatismo had not ended. It had gone lower, closer to the ground, reorganising under pressure. The movement later described a shift towards a more localised structure of autonomy, rooted in the communities themselves rather than the Junta system. But symbolically it was enormous: the most famous experiment in Indigenous autonomy in the Americas had stripped back much of its public presence just as the region around it was being rearranged by cartel power.

As of 2025, Marcos was still writing through Enlace Zapatista, the EZLN’s main channel, no longer Galeano but as Capitán Insurgente Marcos or simply “El Capitán”, from “the mountains of the Mexican southeast”. In this later incarnation, his targets included López Obrador, his Morena party, the opposition and organised crime.

CHIAPAS CHANGED everything for me. I went there in panic, out of options, but still young enough to be vain, ambitious and stupidly available to danger. I knew next to fuck-all, but I had nerve, luck and just enough shame not to mistake myself completely for the story. Somehow, it worked. The crash test dummy became a real journalist. Unprofessional, I was later told, because I couldn’t remove my emotions from the job in hand. But I have never considered my humanity a disqualification.

I thought I was through with politics – in that floppy-fringed, wannabe-urbane way young men have when they confuse boredom with wisdom – until I saw it written in the blood of people I knew. After that, politics stopped being a put-on. It was whether a village slept. Whether a language survived. Whether a friend became a statistic, a martyr or nothing at all.

What I learnt from the Zapatour was: let the music play, keep singing. It confirmed in me, a congenital runaway, a suspicion I had carried since I opened my eyes: that the road is not an empty space between events. It is the event. On the march, my private faith in movement became public and political. I recall every aspect of it with a fierce clarity that would turn a cattle prod on nostalgia. The road is the point: we leave, of necessity; we arrive when we give up. The EZLN would now concur.

I’ve been back to Chiapas a few times, and will go again, but the cartels are an unenlightening enemy. They are not making history, the thing beneath our feet; they are making money. They do not offer a programme, only terms. Their men are not on the ground because they are idealistic or brave, but because they are expendable. There is no bargain to be made with that. People stay, run, submit or die.

I’m glad I started out, however improbably, when I did.

¹ In 2000, Vicente Fox did something many outside Mexico had assumed impossible: he forced the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (a magnificent oxymoron), out of the presidency after 71 uninterrupted years in power, a reign longer than the Soviet Union’s existence as a state. So much for Mexico being bandido country

² My first sighting of a motmot was a lesson in the competing claims of beauty and survival. I was in the Lacandon Jungle, on patrol, moving in a crouch because I was about ten inches taller than most of the Maya men with me and had been told, with some delicacy, that this made me a problem. So I went through the trees doubled over, doing my best impression of undergrowth. Then the bird appeared: green, long-tailed, throat as described, chest puffed up, pleased as punch with itself, and I forgot the arrangements. I rose to my full compromising height, grinning like first prize in a shooting contest. A second later my minder hit me low and hard, and I was back where I belonged: face down in the dirt.

FORGET THE HIBERNOPHILES, the neo-Celts, the fifth-generation Americans with a Dooley in the family – anyone who can spell Ireland will tell you it’s an enchanted place. It’s an established fact. For while its landscapes – all those drumlins, eskers and shades of green, from poteen flask to luckless shamrock – draw more than the occasional gasp, it’s the tales they tell that cast the spell.

The country is sodden with myth. Here be dragons, yes, but also gods, giants, sluaghs, púcas, sídhe and conriochtaí – werewolves, if you please, their beat largely confined to what became Kilkenny and Laois. The hills – tumuli, really – are alive with the sound of banshees. Wherever you go, stories clamber over one another to be heard. It’s as if every blade of grass has got its own.

Storytelling has always been central to Irish culture. In pre-Christian Ireland, each clan chieftain kept a fili – in Old Gaelic, a “seer” – a poet of noble caste charged with versifying and reciting the past and present glories of the ruling class, preserving its genealogies, topographical lore and reputation for heroism and valour. It was through this oral tradition that so much of Irish history, myth and literature was passed on.

Christianisation did not kill that tradition. As paganism fell out of favour and the druids lost their priestly authority, the filid endured, taking on much of their cultural work. The monasteries – Ireland’s centres of learning and manuscript production –gave those oral narratives written form. The result was extraordinary: the largest body of non-Latin literature Europe had seen since Ancient Greece – tribal memory carried onto the Christian page.

So all that guff about the Irish having “the gift of the gab” – close encounter with the Blarney Stone or not – is a belittling of the truth. A classic English belittling: an ancient culture of poetry, memory and performance reduced to mere patter. Behind it sits an old Protestant suspicion of rhetoric and ornament, as though every well-turned sentence were a trick and every smooth-talking Papist out to pluck an English rose.

Dr Bernadette McCarthy, a specialist in Irish myth and literature who teaches in West Cork, has no time for such projections. “The storytelling tradition is part of our identity,” she says. “It is our response to our history. We’re not interested in who we’re not – we define ourselves. In the 19th century, when Ireland was in great difficulty economically and politically, when the Famine hit, those stories were a tremendous source of strength and pride. And later, our writers, like W.B. Yeats, returned to them and their themes, igniting international interest in Irish culture.

“Ireland today is testament to a people who held on to their culture against the odds and to the power of the stories we have always told each other.”

I’m no stranger to the power of those stories. They ripple through me like blood music. On marathon walks, in the manner of Mad Sweeney, the bird-mad king of the medieval Irish tale Buile Shuibhne, I have drunk deep of them: I’ve fished for the Salmon of Knowledge in the River Boyne; met St Patrick and his pirate captors coming ashore in Wicklow; and bumped fists with Cú Chulainn just before he mulched the fields of Louth with his foes.

And you can do the same. Though you may want to meander less. In which case, Brú na Bóinne, in Meath, is here for you. One of the great ritual landscapes of prehistoric Europe, the World Heritage Site gathers engineering, art and myth into one bend of the River Boyne. Its three great passage tombs – Knowth, Newgrange and Dowth – were constructed around 5,000 years ago, before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. The “Palace of the Boyne” contains Europe’s largest concentration of megalithic art and has long been treated as a threshold to the Otherworld.

Supernaturally enough, the Otherworld is a realm where youth, beauty, abundance and joy never run out. As befits a dwelling place of gods and assorted faerie folk – the Tuatha Dé Danann among them – there is, naturally, a strict door policy. The guest list includes the Dagda, god of life, death, weather and time; Dian Cécht, divine healer; and the war goddess Morrígan. Security is said to be more forgiving, though, at the old hinge-points of the year, especially Samhain and Beltane.

A half-hour drive away is Teamhair, the Hill of Tara, the country’s ritual capital. Its monuments and earthworks, dating from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, belong to a much larger ceremonial landscape. Here stands the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny, where legend says the High Kings of Ireland were crowned and, if the chosen chieftain was worthy, the stone would roar its approval.

Paddy Tunney, one of Ireland’s great traditional singers best known for his unaccompanied, highly ornamented style, sings “The Waterford Boys”, a 19th century music hall song of great wit and invention. I include it here simply because I love it.

ALL OF WHICH SERVES as a suitably circuitous introduction to this month’s walk, the Táin Way, a 40km trail that more or less loops around the Cooley Peninsula in Co Louth, on Ireland’s east coast, close to the border. If you have eyes, the peninsula, a handsome protrusion of low mountainous country between Carlingford Lough and Dundalk Bay, has all you could possibly want from two days on foot.

And this is more than fabled territory. Sliabh Foy, the highest of the Cooley Mountains, has its Fionn mac Cumhaill connections – Finn McCool in English, begetter of a thousand bar names, including my favourite in New Orleans, and lampooned mercilessly in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. But the peninsula’s primary claim to legendariness is Táin Bó Cúailnge, The Cattle Raid of Cooley, one of the great works of early Irish literature.

The country’s own Iliad describes a war fought over a phenomenally potent bull. For reasons of jealousy, spite and boredom, Queen Medb of Connacht wants it, and Dáire Mac Fiachna, a wealthy Ulster cattle lord, has it. So she rounds up an army from across Ireland to help her steal it. Trouble is, Cú Chulainn, the 17-year-old demigod of Ulster, is waiting for them. A curse of labour pains has incapacitated the men who might have fought alongside him, leaving him to hold the border alone.

What follows is heroic literature as body horror. The Táin is a fabulously grisly read. Cú Chulainn is a matchless warrior, but slaughter is his true art. In Ciaran Carson’s 2008 translation, his ríastrad, or battle frenzy, produces a horrific, Hulk-like transformation: blood and fire burst from his forehead, one eyeball hangs against his cheek, the muscles of his neck bunch into fists and his shanks and sinews buckle, knot and misalign. Thus rearranged, he commits three massacres whose casualties are “beyond computation”, dismantling his enemies and building walls with their corpses.

It is a wonder that anyone who has read the Táin would want their cause associated with this personification of carnage. Yet by the late 19th century, Cú Chulainn had been cleaned up for political use: recast as an avenging angel transfigured by righteous anger, he became an ideal hero for Celtic Revival figures such as Yeats, the theosophist “AE” Russell and the Gaelic scholar Pádraic Pearse. After Pearse was executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising¹, Cú Chulainn came to stand for the republican struggle, too² .

THE TÁIN WAY starts and finishes a little over an hour’s drive north of Dublin, in Carlingford, a small, once-walled town with a medieval layout and a name that points back to the Vikings. The Norsemen left only its name, Kerlingfjörðr, usually rendered as “the sea-inlet of the hag”. The Normans were more generous: the castle they built around 1190 to command the lough and the route north into Ulster still stands above the harbour, ruined but stabilised, imposing and very much on duty.

The trail loops around Sliabh Foy, and this section of it boasts a peculiar distinction. In 2009, the area was declared a sanctuary for Ireland’s 236 remaining leprechauns, with the EU Habitats Directive invoked in their defence. Yes, you read that right. When I was last there, signs advised walkers to “tread lightly” and warned that “hunters and fortune seekers will be prosecuted”.

The little people have become their own industry, with tours, a folklore park and a “faerie cavern” carrying their name, and Kevin Woods, “the leprechaun whisperer”, who campaigned for their protection, at the centre of it all. The cynical may argue that you don’t need to believe in leprechauns to find a pot of gold.

The Way is travelled by quiet roads, forestry tracks and open mountain paths, and from high points such as Clermont Carn – topped, as the name suggests, by a prehistoric cairn – the views are spectacularly good: north across Carlingford Lough to the Mournes and south down the east coast. Here, as some wag might have it, the scenery chews itself. The total aggregate ascent is about a thousand metres, but the terrain is mostly untroubling, so the moderately fit should be fine. I refuelled at Lumpers Bar, a hikers’ haunt in Ravensdale and, with the permission of a local landowner, bivouacked by a stream under dense tree cover a couple of miles away.

I was following a carefully laid-out trail across the Cooleys, of course, not whacking a ball with a stick. Which is what many of the top hurling and camogie players do here each year in the All-Ireland Poc Fada Championship. The stick is a hurley and the ball a sliotar, and the spoils go to whoever can lash the latter with the former harder, farther and more accurately than the competition.

It’s a brutal form of golf, with a 5km scree-laden course, bogs for rough, ravines for bunkers and no holes you can’t turn an ankle in. Unsurprisingly, the tournament, founded in 1960, has its roots in the myth of Cú Chulainn who, as a boy, they say, poced a sliotar from Carn an Mhadaidh, on Annaverna in the Cooleys, all the way to Eamhain Mhacha in Armagh.

ON MY LAST NIGHT in Louth, after an early dinner of Carlingford oysters – meaty, nutty and harvested here since medieval times – I took off to the neighbouring village of Whitestown and Lily Finnegan’s, its 180-year-old hostelry. Carlingford, most weekends, is awash with hen parties. You may have heard of Lily’s: Owen Finnegan, Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather, left the peninsula for the U.S. in the 1840s and the pub’s namesake was one of his relations. Biden visited Lily’s as vice-president in 2016, then returned to the county as president in 2023.

There was live music – the traditional kind, with fiddle, concertina, bodhrán and penny whistle all pitching in – and the place was whirling. Choreographed by Redbreast whiskey³, I danced a few reels, then staggered into conversation with three sixtysomething regulars who had been waiting for “the visiting writer” to quit his exertions. They were eager to impart the local gospel of how Bruce Springsteen, around the time of his first Irish concert – at Slane Castle in Meath in 1985 – paid Lily’s a visit and the encore they got out of him.

The pub, they said, had been pretty empty and “none of the old fellas would have known who he was”, so they collared The Boss outside. They admitted to “bullying” him for a rendition of one of his anthems – “you know, a blue-collar ode to dock workers or firefighters or checkout girls”. After about five minutes, Springsteen capitulated. “He groaned, but gave us a quick burst of ‘Born in the USA’.” Frank, the most loquacious of the trio, pulled a face, remembering one detail.

“It was grand, but it lacked passion. But hey, we were squealing like teenagers. Then I made a mistake. I said I liked ‘Hungry Heart’ better – you know, from The River – and that I was willing to bet he’d not forgotten the words to that. The great man shook his head. I had tried his patience for the last time.” Springsteen made his excuses and rejoined his friends, but not before buying the boys a Guinness apiece. Smiling again, Frank reassured me: “The craic was deadly!”

If the indulgent expressions of the eavesdropping locals were anything to go by, the trio had been polishing the story for years. They took joy in telling it – not only in the memory, but in the performance. It was their greatest hit, an assured crowd-pleaser, and they did it justice. Bruce would have been proud.

¹ Éamon de Valera, Pearse’s comrade who came to power in the Irish Free State in 1932, marked the approach of the Rising’s 20th anniversary by installing Oliver Sheppard’s sculpture of the demigod’s death in Dublin’s General Post Office, the republican shrine where Pearse had read the proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916. Unveiled in 1935 as the official memorial to the Rising, the bronze turned Cú Chulainn’s broken body into an emblem of national sacrifice.

² There have been attempts to press Cú Chulainn into loyalist service. A Belfast doctor – and later lord mayor – Ian Adamson argued that Ulster had once been the domain of the Cruthin, whom he identified with the Picts, and that Cú Chulainn, a doughty Cruthin, was merely defending his own people against Queen Medb’s mob of Celtic invaders. It was a flawed reading that pushed Ulster’s historical, cultural and even racial separateness from Ireland, and never really caught on beyond the ideologues. Still, in the early Nineties, a loyalist wall in East Belfast bore a faithful reproduction of Sheppard’s dying Cú Chulainn, in a mural sponsored by the Ulster Defence Association, one of the largest loyalist paramilitary groups.

³ The bottle was Redbreast 15, one age statement up from the gateway 12: triple-distilled single pot still whiskey, made from malted and unmalted barley and matured in first-fill and refill ex-bourbon and Oloroso sherry casks. Lemon peel, apple and candy canes on the nose; dusty tropical fruit, polished oak, fudge, ginger and cinnamon spice on the palate. The finish lingers, dry and peppery, tempered by vanilla cream. Water does it no favours, shutting it down rather than opening it up.

TOM WAITS DEVOTEES had mostly reconciled themselves to the idea that, outside his film work, their man was done with making regular appearances. No longer a working musical presence so much as a sporadic apparition, turning up just often enough to remind you what the culture had lost.

His last studio album of new material was 2011’s Bad as Me. Since then, there have been only occasional dispatches. In 2013, he joined Keith Richards for “Shenandoah” on Son of Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys. Five years later, he resurfaced alongside his longtime associate, guitarist Marc Ribot, on Songs of Resistance 1942–2018, taking on the anti-fascist Italian folk song “Bella Ciao”.

In 2012, he performed “Chicago”, from Bad as Me, on Late Show with David Letterman, and “Raised Right Men”, also from that album, on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. On May 5, 2013, he joined the Rolling Stones for “Little Red Rooster” at Oakland’s Oracle Arena. That October, he played a ten-song acoustic set at the Bridge School Benefit in Mountain View, supporting the nonprofit founded by Neil and Pegi Young for children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs.

On May 14, 2015, Waits marked David Letterman’s final week on air with a new song, “Take One Last Look”. A little over a year later, at the 2016 PEN Song Lyrics Award in Boston, he performed “You Can Never Hold Back Spring” as he and Kathleen Brennan – his wife and writing partner – were honoured for literary excellence in song.

He was barely heard from in public again for another six years, until 2022 brought two tribute appearances: one in West Hollywood for his erstwhile collaborator Chuck E. Weiss, the other in New York for the producer and lifelong friend Hal Willner. At the first, he sang Weiss’s “It Rains on Me”. At the second, he performed “Shenandoah”, “Take It With Me” and “I’ll Be Seeing You”.

In December 2023, he turned up beside Iggy Pop on the BBC Radio 6 show Iggy Confidential, picking records and swapping stories in a reunion that faintly echoed their scene together in Jim Jarmusch’s film Coffee and Cigarettes. The recording is below.

It may be that Donald J. Trump’s second, more berserk presidency has helped draw Waits back into view. Organised cruelty, crony enrichment, systematic lying and a studied indifference to human suffering have a way of calling forth artists who still possess a conscience.

In February 2025, Waits appeared in Ultima Fermata (The Last Ride), an episode of RAI’s Il Fattore Umano (The Human Factor) on homelessness, singing and reading from Seeds on Hard Ground, his 2011 poem cycle inspired by Michael O’Brien’s portraits of people the American dream had chewed up and spat out. [Scroll down for video.]

And then, on April 16, came “Boots on the Ground”, his collaboration with Massive Attack, the Bristol group’s first new music since 2020. It came with a film by the band, montaging images by the U.S. photo artist thefinaleye, that leaves no mistaking the forces in its crosshairs. [Scroll down for video.] The official store says a later vinyl edition will feature an exclusive Waits spoken-word B-side, “The Fly”.

The human factor

The Italian documentary series Il Fattore Umano, made by Raffaella Pusceddu and Luigi Montebello for Rai 3, puts flesh on human rights. Each film fixes on a place or crisis where freedom, dignity or equality has come under attack, then lets the damage speak in the first person. There is no reporter planted in the foreground, no anchorman solemnity. Instead, the stories are told by those forced to live them, with contributions from writers, artists and public intellectuals.

The series moves with the grace of art cinema but has the bite of investigative journalism, taking in the exodus from Gaza, organ trafficking in Iraq, migrant prosecutions in the Mediterranean, Britain’s Bibby Stockholm prison ship, the French aftershocks of the Gaza war and, finally, homelessness in the United States.

That final episode, Ultima Fermata – released internationally as The Last Ride – is a journey into the heartland of American abandonment. Made by Angelo Loy, Martino Mazzonis and Montebello, with input from Davide Rinaldi, it travels by Greyhound through Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, shadowing routes used by people visible to the nation chiefly as objects of suspicion, pity or blame.

It looks at the human scrapheap the richest country on earth has built for itself: tent camps, boarded-up houses and the half-lit margins where the discarded are expected to disappear. In America, people become homeless with frightening ease: through unaffordable housing, low pay, unstable work, eviction and the erosion of legal protections, violence, illness, addiction, natural disaster and institutional failure. But the state is better at punishment than rescue, and when it criminalises homelessness it is not restoring civic order but policing the fallout of its own failures.

What lifts The Last Ride beyond reportage, though, is Tom Waits. He is the film’s dark pulse, narrating, reading from Seeds on Hard Ground and performing songs including “Tom Traubert’s Blues” and “The Fall of Troy”. No living American artist is more at home in this terrain. Montebello said the poems and images work as one, and he’s right. The hard truth is that verses written more than a decade ago have not yellowed with age. They still read as current because the country has done so little to change the conditions that made them necessary.

The Last Ride (2025), directed by Angelo Loy, Martino Mazzonis and Luigi Montebello, with Davide Rinaldi and featuring Tom Waits

WAITS KEEPS a broad church and an open house. Over 53 years, he has brought dignity, gravity, poetry, wit and understanding to the derelicts, strays, misfits, outcasts, write-offs, deadbeats, runaways, drifters, dreamers and vagabonds who crowd his songs like regulars in America’s last-chance saloon.

I met a great many of them while travelling America in the course of my work. For a spell, doing that by freight train, I was one of their number, moving through a picaresque of seasonal workers, gutter punks, battle-fried veterans, PTSD cases and opioid ghosts, in a world where theft is routine, violence ambient and trust a luxury. Among them, wandering in and out of the scene, were regular citizens who had simply run out of money, paperwork, patience or lawful ways to get the hell out.

I travelled alone for the most part, keeping digital tabs on a loose crew of about twenty-five riders who were steadier than most. About half could be relied on to turn up with a dog or a guitar. Many a ham-fisted strum-along, mutts howling their horror, was had between Dunsmuir, California and Eugene, Oregon. The hobo songbook has come a long way since Harry McClintock and Woody Guthrie. These days, you’re as likely to hear not always ill-advised covers of Mischief Brew, Wingnut Dishwashers Union, The Orphans and Defiance, Ohio – a rolling canon of dissent and endurance.

Train tramps claim Waits as one of their own, and one of his songs is held in the highest regard. “Down There by the Train” has been sung round jungle fires, hacked into boxcar walls and spoken over the dead, like a memorial script, after riders have caught the westbound. It is a gospel of refuge, raw and unashamedly spiritual, and stubborn in its claim that mercy might still be available to the lost and damned.

Its theology is non-denominational: forgiveness waits for you somewhere on the horizon, redemption a little further down the track. For many hobos, it serves as a national anthem for the people the nation forgot. If you’ve spent two sleepless days waiting under a bridge near a river bend, cold and soaked to the bone, you’ll understand why a slow train represents salvation.

There’s a golden moon that shines up through the mist,
and I know that your name will be on that list.
There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth,
I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth,

Down there by the train,
down there by the train,
down there by the train,
down there by the train,
down there where the train goes slow.

I’m hoping this year to interview Tom about freight trains in his music: their folklore, romance and the place they still occupy in the popular imagination.

For more on freights, rubber tramping and what freedom looks like in the land of the fucked, click here.

On the Nickel, Ralph Waite’s 1980 Skid Row film, follows a recovering alcoholic drawn back to the world – and damaged fellowship – he tried to leave behind. Waits wrote the title song, later included on Heartattack and Vine

Gone to ground

In America, a supposed land of plenty, need is a native language and the social order is rigged. Under Trump, homelessness has been met not with housing but with handcuffs, removals and the threat of commitment, as he treats power as a private racket for himself, his family and their courtiers.

His homelessness policy is best understood not as an attempt to reduce poverty but as a law-and-order response to its visibility. The clearest statement came in the July 24, 2025 executive order, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets”, which frames street homelessness chiefly as disorder, addiction, mental illness and public danger. It instructs the Attorney General to challenge limits on involuntary commitment and directs federal agencies to favour states and cities that ban camping, loitering and squatting.

Its importance lies in the way it seeks to nationalise what City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024) made easier. The Court held that enforcing generally applicable public-camping bans against homeless people does not, in itself, breach the Eighth Amendment. In effect, it gave cities and states far greater latitude to fine and arrest people, even where shelter is scarce.

The White House has been explicit: reward the jurisdictions that clear encampments and restore order, and strip away the legal constraints on coercive policing and institutional confinement. Homelessness is recast as blight, as the supposed “choice” of addicts and the mentally ill, and therefore as something to be punished or pushed out of sight. That stands in stark contrast to Housing First, which starts from the premise that stable housing is the foundation of recovery.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s latest nationwide count found that more than 770,000 people were homeless on a single night in January 2024, up 18 per cent on the year before. Set against the scale of the crisis, this administration’s priorities are revealing. There will be no serious expansion of federal housing provision, only a tougher campaign of criminalisation and compulsory treatment.

The clearances in Washington, D.C., last year exposed the cruelty and futility of the model. For the sake of appearances, people were swept out without anything like adequate facilities to receive them, then scattered so thoroughly that street-medicine teams and outreach workers often no longer knew where to find them. The result was missed appointments, lost medication, broken casework and lives driven further into the shadows.

Dark matter

Massive Attack initiated the collaboration years before “Boots on the Ground” was released. The band appear to have held on to Waits’s vocal until the political moment – ICE raids, state authoritarianism, the militarisation of domestic life and Washington’s oil wars – made the song feel grimly apt.

It’s like a chain-gang work song rebuilt as a funeral march for the republic – all martial snare and the dead-eyed rhythm of men being driven forward under senseless orders. Into that comes Waits, sounding as though the song had found him half-buried in the rubble it describes. He is there to give voice to the damage of war without end, policing without restraint and punishment without relief.

Waits said: “Today – as in all of mankind’s yesterdays – guarantees this song will never go out of style. Man’s fiasco folly is a feast for the flies.” The coming 12-inch carries an exclusive Waits spoken-word piece, “The Fly”, his “appreciation for the winged nuisance”.

“Boots on the Ground.” Viewers seeking further information or wishing to take action are encouraged to visit aclu.org, veterans-aid.net and immigrantdefenseproject.org

An extra, “Take One Last Look” from the Late Show with David Letterman, May 14, 2015

IT WAS EARLY March and the cold had made a home of my bones. A British Army bivvy bag is all well and good, but when your only bed is the back of a car and that car is parked in the American Northwest, it isn’t a cuddly proposition.

Still, the place could put on a show. After two snowbound weeks at Idaho truck stops, I felt blessed to be pulling into a windswept campsite near Yachats, Oregon, just off the Pacific Coast Highway. At high tide there, nature flexes its theatrical chops: Thor’s Well – a sinkhole in the basalt rock – appears to suck the ocean into itself.

The first time I saw it, dawn was on her first coffee, so I had the performance to myself. Later, I was told, the lookout fills with Flat Earthers who come to snap selfies with what they consider proof of the world’s edge. They pose, grinning beside it, as though they were at some sort of Disneyland for doomsday prophets.

Considerable discomfort, a little disgrace (there comes a point when taking nature’s call in a bucket loses its frontier charm) and a slideshow of vistas that trigger spiritual epiphanies in the easily bedazzled – that’s “van life” for you. And I say that as a blacktop veteran, a freelance journalist who’s spent the better part of ten years living out of his car across 49 states, joining the estimated three million Americans now living, working and, naturally, travelling full-time in some form of motorised shelter.

This rolling existence has recently come under the spotlight, courtesy of three golden statuettes. Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book, cleaned up at the Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress. It follows Fern, a 61-year-old woman who, after losing her husband, job and home in the Great Recession, packs her life into a Ford Econoline and sets off on a journey of – yep, you’ve got it – self-discovery, all the while being played with formidable grace by Frances McDormand. We should all be so lucky.

On my own travels across this vast, contradictory country, I’ve met every flavour of “rubber tramp”. The full-timers are a dogged breed – breezy, resourceful and adamant that trading “bricks and sticks” for “wheel estate” isn’t abandoning the American dream but rebooting it.

They roam solo, chasing piecework and seasonal gigs, and find their version of community scattered across the 640 million acres of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest, National Park and Fish and Wildlife Services – most of it out west.

The snowbirds are seasonal nomads, mostly retirees, who migrate south for the winter in convoys of pristine RVs, armed with lawn chairs and bridge decks, determined to outwait the cold somewhere their joints won’t mutiny.

The boondockers are another species entirely – extreme campers, really – who voluntarily sleep rough in remote spots with no hookups, hookups being decadent betrayals of the wilderness creed.

As for me, I’m one of those digital nomads you’ve probably heard too much about – but I travel for work, not Instagram. “Work”, though, may be overselling it. Seven-tenths of the miles I rack up do little more than audition for publication. The moment I think I’m onto something, wild geese launch a counteroffensive, the mythic gives way to the mundane, leads take wrong turns and promising starts run into sudden dead ends. Only the tall tales keep growing – until, at the first whiff of exposure, their tellers develop an allergy to newsprint.

So perhaps “dirtbagger” is closer to the mark. Urban Dictionary defines one as someone who “casts off the restraints of a conventional life to pursue their passion”. Usually that means climbers, surfers, adrenaline addicts with sun-bleached hair and a trail of PO boxes. But writing, at least the way I do it, can be no less hazardous – merely less picturesque.

IN 2019, I SPENT a few days at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous – a two-week gathering held each January near the old mining town of Quartzsite, Arizona. Sneered at by cynics as “Burning Man for retirees”, it drew around 10,000 people when I was there. The event later became the spiritual backdrop to Nomadland, and its founder, Bob Wells, appears in the film alongside several other real-life van dwellers.

Wells is no extra, though; he’s a van-life evangelist with his own YouTube channel, CheapRVLiving, and his Rendezvous is serious business: a skills swap and survival fair, a dusty university of the outcast arts, not some floaty desert jamboree. Knowledge is the coin of this realm: the secrets of stealth parking, how to wire solar panel rigs, where to find the cheapest dentists in Mexico.

There was no hierarchy, no top dogs barking orders. I met a bunch of freighthoppers scouting for a school bus to convert into a communal living space – bunk beds, a library at the back, weed in the hold – and they were met with nothing but warmth and an enthusiasm that caught like kindling.

Wells founded the nonprofit Homes on Wheels Alliance in 2018 to help “nomads in need” – furnishing people with suitably equipped vehicles, funding essential repairs and keeping an emergency fund in reserve. Based in Pahrump, Nevada, the organisation has ambitions beyond the desert because homelessness is nothing if not geographically promiscuous.

Thors Well, Yachats, Oregon; a man drowned there last September

AFTER A YEAR holed up in the UK thanks to Covid, I was reunited with my car in New Orleans on February 16, 2021 – the date of the Mardi Gras the virus put paid to (we made do with a porch-front version: Yardi Gras).

It had spent 12 months parked on a Bywater side street, enduring a lively hurricane season and a spike in car crime brazen enough to strip a parade float mid-procession. And yet it survived without a scratch. It even started at the first time of begging.

I’d been feeling the pull of the road for months. I was meant to be writing a book, something broadly in the tradition of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. But it was still in an embryonic state, better defined by its working title than by any actual progress: Travels Without Charley: Starring a 17-year-old slate-grey Toyota Sienna with the back seats ripped out. I wish I were joking.

To write his bestselling travelogue, Steinbeck bought a 1960 GMC pickup and had it fitted with a custom-built Wolverine slide-in camper, then still a rarity. He named this home on wheels Rocinante, after the noble steed of Don Quixote.

My own, altogether humbler conveyance answers to Dapple¹ , Sancho Panza’s donkey. It does not aspire to legend. It aspires to holding oil and water in their proper places. And I have spent more time in it than Steinbeck ever did in Rocinante.

[Not long after I wrote this piece, I had to return to the UK for medical reasons. The book, shelved for a period, is in much better shape these days – tap here for details.]

HOW’D I GET HERE, really? A perpetual drifter, sleeping in my car in foreign countries, my back a map of thin mattresses and the anchor points, bolt heads and weld seams they fail to soften. Maybe I prefer the absence of expectation, on both sides of the arrangement. I’m housebroken, technically, but I’ve always felt like a squatter in my own homes and a burglar in everyone else’s.

Diagnosed with bipolar I at 14, I grew up sideways, without traditional prospects, stitching drink and drugs into the lining of a misfit adolescence – not for the thrill of it, but for the fellowship, for the feeling of belonging to something. They also provided camouflage for my mania – the messianic certainty, the sleepless propulsion, the apocalyptic logic – that nothing then available on prescription could quiet.

Adulthood arrived early in the form of two daughters, long before I’d done with childhood, so I improvised a life. With no qualifications, my CV up to the age of 28 reads like a charge sheet. I never expected to see my name in print unless it was beside the words “appeared before magistrates”. Then I got clean, gave my résumé a coat of bullshit and put the scraps of writing promise I’d shown in my teens to paid use.

Mexico came first, where I reported on the fag-end of the Zapatista rebellion and joined the EZLN’s march from San Cristóbal de las Casas to Mexico City in support of Indigenous rights and autonomy. Back in the UK, I picked up a variety of freelance gigs before joining the launch team of The London Paper, writing about opera, theatre, dance, film, music and travel. Then came The Times and The Sunday Times.

The first time I walked into a broadsheet office, I felt like a stray dog at a garden party. The place fizzed with a kind of elite ease I’d only ever seen on television. I copied speech, mirrored manners and tried not to nick anything. Somehow, my failure to fit in passed for originality. Even so, I never quite shook the suspicion that, sooner or later, someone would hand me a rake and point me towards the croquet lawn.

Then, in 2010, I got a taste of what I’d been missing. I wrote a cover story, “The Railway Children”, for The Sunday Times Magazine about the new generation of hobos. In pitching it, I offered up a Norman Rockwell version of myself – an unfabulous beast cut from tired cloth: Huck Finn dungarees and Woody Guthrie conductor’s cap – climbing into a boxcar in California and stepping off in Britt, Iowa, for the National Hobo Convention. This was back when I was still living inside a cartoon strip.

The reality was something else, and I surrendered to it, hitting my deadline but staying on the rails, covering 5,000 miles by freight train over four months and 10,000 across two years. I slept in coal cars and jungle camps, scavenged from dumpsters, updated my Crew Change Guide and mostly dodged the railroad police. I felt capable – three-quarters cockroach, Armageddon-ready. I had contracted an incurable condition: a kind of wanderlust for nowhere places reached by outlawed means.

It became a turning point in my professional life, though at the time it felt more like a homecoming than a career move. The existence was precarious and dangerous – if a freight train did not crush or impale you outright, parts of it were apt to shear off and skin you in a blizzard of rusted metal – but it was free. It also brought me into intimate contact with the country’s underside: often feral, generally lawless and peopled by the collateral damage of the American dream. That is the terrain that became my writing patch.

I almost lost myself out there. Some part of me has always been in flight, an inveterate runaway, forever dreaming of lighting out for the territory, of slipping the net of my beginnings and shedding the scars, tics and tells that give us away to others and keep us legible to ourselves. My return to civilisation had to be carefully negotiated. For a time, that meant living out of the back of a car.

The mechanics of the road

The romance of the road is analogue, but its engine is digital. The bootstraps brigade forgets that we are all hauled up by signal strength now. “If you can afford a phone…” – the idiot’s refrain. These days a phone is the first thing the homeless² are criticised for owning and the last thing they can afford to lose: navigation system, job centre, benefits portal, lifeline. I use mine to monitor police traffic near wherever I’ve bedded down.

The Campendium and FreeCampsites websites have become the field guides of the new itinerancy, flagging friendly Walmart car parks, all-night truck stops and Forest Service clearings down logging roads, and providing the dull but crucial particulars: water, showers, hook-ups, fire rings, dump stations, cell signal, access, enforcement. Regular updates, live intelligence. Boondockers Welcome extends the map into private space, unlocking thousands of driveways, yards and scraps of pasture where, membership paid, I can put down for a night or two.

My need to stretch out – to remind my body it was built for wider, more open spaces – is real. I’m turning 50 this year and, at 6 foot 3, with a case of driver’s slump, a spine like a crumpled concertina and discs that herniate on a whim, the limits of in-car living are no longer theoretical. Bumbling around in the back of my Toyota, barely able to kneel upright, is not, despite appearances, a yoga pose.

So I keep my Anytime Fitness membership current. The chain has gyms all over the States, which sounds aspirational until you realise it is also, in effect, a nationwide shower subscription. If I time it right, the crash mats will do for a few hours and Dapple can rest her axles. You learn quickly not to antagonise the machine keeping you nominally housed. Gratitude, superstition, preventative maintenance.

We do what we can, those of us without health insurance, to keep mind and body – if not in harmony, then at least on nodding terms. A single hospital visit could financially wreck me. Urgent care comes with a punitive cover charge: without insurance, a visit can run from $125 to $300 before anyone starts adding tests, “just to be safe”, or the follow-up that turns the first bill into the opening act.

The wider American picture is one in which sickness is never just a clinical event but often a financial one too. Medical debt in the U.S. runs to at least $220 billion, and one national study of bankruptcy filers found that two-thirds identified medical bills, illness-related loss of income or both as having helped drive them under.

When I’m in New Orleans, where my car is registered, I sign up for clinical trials – the next best thing to having insurance. They pay and they come with a full check-up to see if you’re trial-worthy. More than once I’ve been ruled out, usually because my systolic pressure is edging past 145, but they’ve handed over the pills to bring it back down. A consolation prize in tablets.

Dapple’s in better shape than I am. It doesn’t take much to ready her for action either: a thin twin mattress, bedding, bug nets, a fan, a first-aid kit, offline maps, a propane stove, a fire extinguisher, flares, a water filter, a portable toilet, roadside emergency gear and sheets of Reflectix foil to keep the heat at bay. These are not just practicalities. If an official starts asking questions, they help suggest that, whatever else you are, you are at least prepared.

A hotspot booster helps me stay connected, but when I need reliable WiFi, I turn to the ever-open fast-food joints that dot the outskirts of every American town. I’ve lost track of the words I’ve filed from a McDonald’s at 2am, running on cheap coffee while under fluorescents that made my fillings throb. And if the car is coming down with something, there is usually a garage or motel nearby.

BETWEEN JOBS, I don’t stay anywhere longer than a week unless there are mountains to hike or water to fish. I rent rods for trout, bass and walleye and I noodle for catfish, which means fishing with bare hands and using your fingers as bait. Summers have taken me through Utah, Oklahoma, the Ozarks and the Great Lakes, though I tend to avoid the more aggressively scenic spots, where even living in your car is starting to look gentrified. Dapple has been sniffed at by RVs the size and styling of cruise ships and by solar-powered Kombivans done up like country cottages. To their owners, I might as well be bedding down in a shop doorway.

Well, sniff away, “neighbours” – I don’t care that my car resembles a giant shoebox stuffed with trash and, once I’m tucked in, an overnourished corpse. She gets the job done. And that job often means waking up to wave at bears, cougars and elk in national parks that make Paradise look like a parking lot.

I’ll stay on the road until March next year, when I head to the UK for my daughter’s wedding. If I return to the States – and I can’t imagine I’ll keep away for long – I’ll probably slide right back into it. I’ve got friends all over the country who’ll take me in if I’m feeling rough, sociable or simply lazy. And when payday comes, there’s always some B-movie motel room waiting, lousy cable flickering over furnishings that look as though they were picked out of a line-up.

And I’m fortunate besides. Yes, I’ve been drugged, beaten and robbed, jailed and fined for vagrancy, had my car towed and impounded in three states and been asked by a meth head, at wandering gunpoint, to explain myself quicker than I could get the words out. But those weren’t the inevitable pitfalls of life on the road – just the occupational hazards of being a journalist who doesn’t take “fuck off” for an answer.

Nomadland, an apartheid state

Let’s be frank: Nomadland is a lie, a beautifully lit, dreamy lie. It barely grazes the realities of van life that the excellent book it is based on dissects so unsparingly. It does not pretend to be a documentary, of course, though it borrows authenticity by asking people to play themselves, as if their presence were enough to vouch for the picture it is painting.

It presents the full-timers as latter-day pioneers, heading west and striking a blow for freedom, seen in wide pans and bathed in gold, rather than as discards trying to make the best of it – and what “it” is is best left unprobed. It is reality softened by a windfall and a few drinks round a campfire. Or else the story rubber tramps tell themselves on a good day, before the money for basics runs out.

There is no harm in depicting people with dignity, but dignity should not come at the expense of truth about what put them on the road in the first place. The real challenge, which Nomadland declines, is to balance compassion for individuals with a critical understanding of the forces that leave them so exposed.

The open road, once slick with promise, has lost much of its shimmer. For rubber tramps, it can still offer a sliver of agency in an otherwise brutal system, even as it cuts them loose from what remains of the social safety net – stable work, healthcare, secure housing – and, once you fall off the grid, the ways back are few.

But at least their skins are the right shade. However hard on the heart van life may be, it is still a white romance, because the freedom to disappear into the landscape is not one this country grants equally. The open road that Nomadland proposes as a stage for self-reinvention has never been open in the same way to everyone.

According to the most recent point-in-time count by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, roughly 771,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2024 – about one in every 440 Americans, the highest figure on record and an 18 per cent increase on the year before. Black Americans, who make up 12 per cent of the U.S. population, accounted for 32 per cent of those counted, while Hispanic or Latino people made up 30.6 per cent. The tally, used by policymakers to gauge the scale of the crisis, includes both sheltered and unsheltered people – those in shelters and those on the streets, in tents and in vehicles.

The problem is twofold. Metropolitan neighbourhoods where minority cultures once took root have been emptied of the people who made them. The destruction of public housing, speculative development and “white return” – professionals working longer hours, staying in the city and drawing parents back in behind them to help with childcare – have all played their part. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition estimates that gentrifying neighbourhoods once majority-Black have lost 261,000 Black residents.

And displacement does not mean staying nearby. It is becoming harder for the uprooted to remain anywhere close to their old streets, schools, churches, corner shops and kin. Rising rents drive them out, while laws against vehicle dwelling, overnight parking and urban camping increasingly stop them from hanging on at the margins of the places they know. For some, the car was the last frail means of keeping within reach of work, family or familiarity. Now even that is being criminalised. The result is not just dispossession from housing, but estrangement from community itself.

And for many people of colour, hitting the road – whether by necessity or by choice – is simply unconscionable. It means moving through not only a history of exclusion, but the live circuitry of a deportation regime, where a broken tail-light or a routine stop can end in an impound lot, a detention cell or both. At that point the road ceases to be a route out and becomes, instead, a feeder line to immigration custody³.

New laws and court rulings have made it easier for American cities to clear encampments, criminalise street sleeping and extend the same hostility to people sleeping in cars. This is not only about tents. In Grants Pass – shorthand for the 2024 Supreme Court case City of Grants Pass v. Johnson – sleeping in a vehicle could be treated as “camping”. So the new climate does not only bear down on those under tarpaulins and among shopping carts, but on those trying to salvage a last pocket of privacy behind a windscreen and locked doors.

Trump’s executive order of July 24, 2025 took the opening created by Grants Pass and tried to turn it into national policy, urging agencies to reward cities that ban urban camping, loitering and squatting, fund encampment clearances and push the homeless into treatment or confinement by coercive means where possible. What Grants Pass cleared in law, Trump moved to incentivise in policy: the treatment of visible misery – that glaring indictment of unregulated capitalism – as a policing matter and poverty itself as a form of disorder.

On the street, it takes the form of sweeps in which police and municipal workers tow cars and vans, seize personal belongings and, in some reported cases, smash windows or wrench open doors to drag occupants out. It is, in effect, a raid, treating improvised shelter as a threat and those inside it as bodies to be processed, displaced and erased. In such circumstances, a vehicle is often the last remaining asset, the final redoubt of autonomy and the container of all that has not yet been taken.

¹ It pains me to report that Dapple was left on the street with expired tags and ended up in the pound. In many American jurisdictions, authorities can tow and impound vehicles with expired registration, sometimes without much or any warning, depending on local law and where the car is left. I found out while I was in the UK seeking medical attention. I had trusted it would be tucked away in a garage.

² A contentious word. I know “unhoused” and “person experiencing homelessness” are often preferred. For me, “homeless” does not imply helplessness. The word covers both those allergic to permanence and hostile to paperwork, and those priced out, evicted or failed by welfare systems. The distinction lies in the story, not the label, and you should always stick around for the story.

³ As of April 17, 2026, ICE said it had 1,697 active 287(g) agreements covering 39 states and two U.S. territories. These agreements bind local police and sheriffs’ departments more closely to federal immigration enforcement. Under the revived Task Force Model, that cooperation no longer happens only in jail, after an arrest has already been made, but out on the street in the ordinary course of policing. In practice, that means an immigration question can enter something as routine as a traffic stop.

I WAS IN A DINER, somewhere close to the childhood home of Hunter S. Thompson, when my hangover began to take hold. I doubted I had the means to fight it as I’d just lost a staring contest with my coffee. But I needn’t have worried. Suddenly, as though summoned, a delicately put-together busboy appeared at my table, radiating pity like a Marian apparition. He inquired with a downy burr, “Want a refill? With something extra in it? Would sir like a Kentucky coffee?”

That, my friends, is Louisville for you. The birthplace of bourbon whiskey has been reading minds for as long as it’s been scrambling them – 200 years and some change. My first evening there had been a long one. I had seen off the night, put the morning in a headlock and made threats against the afternoon before I got to bed.

I forgave myself, though. I was overexcited. Louisville felt like a homecoming to key parts of my personality – which might sound a little mystical until you consider this: the city has given us Old Forester, the Kentucky Derby, Muhammad Ali and the godfather of gonzo journalism. And I’m a lush, a gambler, a semi-retired brawler and a writer with a weakness for what are politely called “adventures”.

The trip had been on the cards for a while. Foretold on actual cards, in fact. About five years ago, in a tavern in Muskogee, Oklahoma, I played a few hands of pinochle with a man who claimed to be a defrocked Baptist preacher. He didn’t say how the cloth came to be whipped from his back, and I had the sense not to ask. After losing my third twenty, I was ready to surrender the field when he rested a hand on mine and murmured: “Soon you will be in Kentucky, where whiskey forms like dew on the outstretched tongues of true believers. And I can see you’re one, son.” It’s not every day your life throws up a scene fit for the Great American – Country – Songbook.

Declared by Congress in 1964 to be a “distinctive product of the United States” – America’s only native spirit – bourbon, a whiskey made from at least 51 per cent corn and aged in new charred-oak barrels, is having a high time of it right now. Sales are up for the tenth consecutive year, and exports appear to be setting records simply to have something to break. Kentucky is the main beneficiary of this boom, of course, as it produces 95 per cent of the world’s bourbon. The spirit decants about $8.6 billion each year into the Bluegrass State’s economy and employs, in some way, shape or fashion, close to 18,000 people.

I HAD DRIVEN to Louisville to join the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, a network of 16 distilleries in central Kentucky linking the city to Bardstown, 40 miles to the south, and Lexington, 90 minutes east. With glasses still raised, it seemed as good a time as any to drink to the brown stuff’s revival. Known locally as the Amber Triangle, this heartland country is essentially the Napa Valley for the hard of drinking, only much less manicured. There are views here that would stop a getaway driver in their tracks.

Louisville is looking especially well on bourbon’s resurgence. It has always been a handsome city – a pick-and-mix of Victorian Gothic, Richardsonian Romanesque, early Chicago School and Beaux Arts buildings – but until recently it had the air of a shuttered museum. In 2016, Angel’s Envy, downtown’s first full-production distillery, opened on Main Street, and within three years six more distillers had set up shop nearby, breathing life back into Whiskey Row, the historic centre of the bourbon trade: an elegant terrace of 19th-century warehouses with shopfronts and cast-iron facades that, unthinkably now, had been slated for demolition in 2011.

Life has returned to the city, in the way it does in the early 21st century, with all the chichi trappings of gentrification and the largely manufactured taste of its newest arrivals: commissioned street art, upscale coffee houses, farm-to-table dining, galleries, lofts, even a freshly minted neighbourhood, NuLu, in which to show them all off. For all that, there was a discernible pulse about the place, even on a Wednesday afternoon in October, in sidewalk-denting rain.

I based myself there, though I was on the road most days. Not me alone, either. I had a driver: an old friend I had not seen in ten years. Helen, a lifelong Kentuckian, waited until we were standing in front of each other to tell me she’d given up drinking – the sacrament of our former life, the one rite we had always observed together – and that there would be no debate

I felt awful, like some textbook enabler, the stuff of sobriety seminars. She brushed off my guilt as self-important nonsense. “Honey, I live under my own influence these days. It’s good to reconnect. I like a road trip and I’ve got a book to read. Keep your breath out of my face and we’ll both be fine.”

I never quite shed the guilt. Most of the time, with her ECT hair, bullet ants inked down her forearms and lips bent round a Palace Brothers lyric, she looked perfectly content. But she would eye certain bars – and the warring couples in their parking lots – with a scowl so heavy it seemed capable of dragging her face under.

We covered a lot of ground, getting to nine distilleries within the Triangle. Each had something distinctive to recommend it. In Louisville, a former stand-up whose uncle was a moonshiner gave me a tour of the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, which was disconcertingly child-friendly, like Disneyland for budding dipsos; the new Rabbit Hole Distillery, whose tasting room had the best views of the city; Angel’s Envy, with its cathedral-like main building, which sits above an alley once used for racing goats; and Old Forester, which stayed in production during Prohibition by supplying pharmacies under licence and still makes its own barrels on site.

Heading south, we took in the Jim Beam American Stillhouse in Clermont and Maker’s Mark in Loretto, the oldest working bourbon distillery on its original site. At Beam, the welcome understandably cooled when I asked what recent warehouse fires had meant for the creeks and rivers taking their toxic runoff. The producer of the world’s bestselling bourbon prefers to trumpet the purity of its limestone-filtered water and its conservation-minded partnership with the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, rather than dwell on the deaths of thousands of crappie, walleye and black bass. I relayed this to Helen. “See,” she said, “drinking like a fish will kill you.”

On the way to Lexington, we were guests at Woodford Reserve, an Aaron Copland symphony in oak and stone. From its 500-foot barrel run to its lobby, where vast soft leather couches gave Helen a view of the rain to read by – Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, “for the sailors” – the place seemed built to make a virtue of repose.

We also visited Buffalo Trace, which produces the Old Van Winkle and Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve labels with the Van Winkles, whiskies so scarce that apps exist to track them down, usually at ten to twenty times their recommended retail price. And then Castle & Key: a new distillery of unpausing ambition, set deep in the woods and housed in a restored “medieval” fortress and its outbuildings. Built in 1887 by the bourbon patriarch Colonel E.H. Taylor, it even had its own railway line. Now, in Marianne Barnes, it has Kentucky bourbon’s first female master distiller.

A favourite of mine, Will Oldham – of Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Palace, in its various forms – is a Louisville native who returned to live in the city in 2006. His latest album, We Are Together Again, was made there with local musicians. In this recent Quietus interview, he discusses Louisville’s contribution to music and the power of its communities. N.B. The video – for a hoedown gospel take on I See a Darkness, recorded in 2012 – was filmed in Glasgow.

AFTER THREE TOURS, I had the business of distillation down pat. After five, my lips were moving in time with the guides’. There are only so many ways of describing the process, after all. But that is not to say distillery tours get old. They are places of sensual rapture: mash vats mulching the air; barrels sighing in their rickhouses; angels reeling from their “share” among the rafters; and refulgent pot and column stills, like extravagantly contorted instruments in some fantastical orchestra, most of them made by the same Louisville firm, Vendome Copper & Brass Works.

And they are also places of magic – a peculiarly resilient kind, surviving every effort to rationalise it away. Each tour ended with a tasting of between two and five whiskeys, and whenever I raised a glass to my lips, everything I had learnt about its creation began replaying in my head. Yet words I had taken for technical terms suddenly acquired a mysterious force, like incantations steeped in liquid smoke. The spirit of bourbon is raised by such spells.

We drove all over Kentucky. Leaving behind the prosperous air of the Trail’s tobacco barns, horse ranches, bluegrass pastures and creek-ribboned stands of old oak, we followed its undulations as they rolled southeast into the Appalachian coalfields. There, poverty, meth labs, black lung, opioid abuse and dry counties occasioning drunken drives home help keep average life expectancy below 69. The landscape of levelled peaks, buried hollers and lagoons of poisonous slurry is dotted with ghost towns, and many of their living neighbours are fading fast.

On the way back to Louisville, we stopped in Corbin, where Colonel Sanders ran his first restaurant out of the back of a filling station. A former sundown town, Corbin saw a white mob force nearly all of its 200 Black residents onto a freight train out of town in 1919, then spent decades making clear that any return should not happen after dark. The town has begun, unevenly and under pressure, to acknowledge that history, but acknowledgment is not the same as reckoning.

MOST OF MY EVENINGS were spent in Louisville, which is a fine drinking town, with a bar for every kind of drinker. Its patrons understand that bars are public places, that a night out is in large part a collective endeavour, and that strangers are generally to be welcomed. The city keeps late hours, and in some of the smarter establishments you can order bourbons that never make it to the liquor stores.

I spent a day at Churchill Downs. I had, of course, read “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”, Hunter S. Thompson’s great 1970 dispatch for Scanlan’s Monthly, and assumed I had forfeited any chance of seeing the track innocently. But it was not a race day, and my experience of the place – a guided tour of the course by a wisecracking press officer – was not the hellscape of ersatz gentility and seersucker feudalism I had come prepared for, even after a couple of mint juleps.

Afterwards, still on a Hunter jag, I called in at the Hideaway Saloon on Bardstown Road in the Highlands, not far from Cherokee Triangle, Louisville’s old money quarter, where Thompson grew up after his family settled there in December 1943, and which he spent much of his life both escaping and feeding on. The district still trades on that connection. GonzoFest, launched in Louisville in 2013, helped keep Bardstown Road and the surrounding streets in the orbit of his legend.

I was playing pool – spots, two up, winner stays on – when an unpatched biker in his early fifties, with fresh tattoos and a carefully groomed beard, overheard my conversation at the table, put down some money and asked what I had been doing with my time in Kentucky. I gave him the rundown and he nodded along amiably enough until I got to Corbin and KFC.

“Hope you ain’t gonna write anythin’ negative about the Colonel,” he said. “That man was a war hero, and we’re very protective of him here. He’s like everybody’s papaw. Pick on him and you’ll have a lot of people putting up wanted posters with your picture on ’em.”

He looked at me as though I’d been sent to profane everything he held sacred. I wondered how he had managed to avoid the facts of his hero’s life. I weighed the risk of putting him straight. He was a big man and seemed to have no shortage of anger to draw on, but much of his size had gone to blubber, which looked as much a handicap as an asset. And he didn’t appear to be carrying. So I unbuttoned my lip.

“Buddy, Harland Sanders wasn’t an officer in the U.S. Army. Unless he served with Sergeant Pepper and Major Tom. And he wasn’t a war hero. He enlisted, but that was the limit of his military distinction. ‘Kentucky Colonel’ is an honorary title bestowed by the governor, not a rank. Shirley Temple had one. And you do not have to be from Kentucky to receive it, which is just as well, because Sanders wasn’t. He was from Indiana.”

I called the pocket, dropped the eight-ball and readied myself for whatever was coming. Then, from behind me, the head barman placed four quarters on the rail and said, dead level, “Time to go. Can’t have you upsetting my regulars.”

I took my punishment, such as it was, and left, relieved that I had chosen not to mention Sanders’s support for George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama who ran for president as an independent in 1968, or that the Colonel’s name had once circulated alongside J. Edgar Hoover’s and John Wayne’s when Wallace was casting about for a running mate.

I had better luck at the Holy Grale, a Highlands gastropub in a former Unitarian chapel, where a sermon on the local craft beer scene was delivered with conviction. But all the talk of lambics, saisons and goses made my head spin for all the wrong reasons. How the language of everyday drinking has swollen. I can remember a time when it was possible to sit down with a beer and talk about something other than hop types, yeast pedigrees and flavour profiles. Now farmhouse ales are brewed with oyster mushrooms, “for the umami”, and paired with kimchi fries, as though a pint existed chiefly to advertise its drinker’s discernment.

HAPPY TO RETURN TO bourbon, and to talk that might stray beyond the contents of my glass, I made for the Silver Dollar¹, a Louisville bar inspired by the California honky-tonks that fed and watered Dust Bowl migrants and helped produce the Bakersfield sound, a blueprint for much of the outlaw country that came in its wake. There was a decent crowd, spread between the counter and two tables. I was not going to be stuck for conversation.

I let an Elmer T. Lee Single Barrel – a Buffalo Trace bourbon named for one of its master distillers – pop me on the kisser just as Merle Haggard’s I Won’t Give Up My Train pulled out. Country is narrative music, it tells stories, and it did not take long for my fellow patrons, hunched over their tumblers like a chorus line of regret, to start telling me theirs.

Ray was in his fifties and from Bullitt County, just south of Louisville. He had the red eyes of a man who had spent half his life around diesel fumes. He drove aggregate trucks until his back gave out and a loading mishap flattened his right thumb. He liked to lay the spatulate digit against his glass as though presenting Exhibit A. His second wife had left him for a man who sold church lighting. “That,” he said, with a dry snort, “is Kentucky in one sentence. The Lord gets LEDs. I get bourbon.”

Colleen, forty-two, had come over from New Albany, Indiana, just across the Ohio. She wore a black cardigan pilled at the cuffs, carried a tote bag with a broken strap and laughed in short, disbelieving bursts, like a car trying not to start. “This place is too close,” she said. “I only cross when I really need to drown my sorrows.” This time it was her husband, a pinball-machine repairer, who had been seeing a grief counsellor. “That makes it sound like he should be the one drowning his sorrows,” she said. “No. He’s cheating on me with her.” Then she raised two fingers to the bar. “If someone could get me a rye and ginger, I need to go to the bathroom.”

Leonard, from Shively, near Churchill Downs, dressed like a retired deacon – tan windbreaker zipped to the sternum, pale blue shirt buttoned high – but his pallor and snappish temperament belonged to a man who’d spent thirty-five years in a job he hated, mostly on nights. He had recently buried a wife he adored and seemed to treat the rest of life as a wake with too many visitors. He nodded at his glass after sipping, as if it had imparted some rare wisdom he had no intention of sharing.

Sheila was a bail bondswoman who had once sung in a wedding band called Twice Blessed and still carried herself as if the applause had only stepped outside to smoke. Age had sharpened her, though she could be funny if you were worth it. If she hadn’t taken a shine to you, however, her lacquered smile held no warmth, only wit looking for somewhere vulnerable to land.

She declared herself the “what’s the opposite of proud?” mother of two grown sons and discussed Manhattan recipes and Tammy Wynette with equal authority. Noticing Ray pull a face at Leonard, she said, “People say I’m intimidating, but that’s because I quit doing half their work for them.”

The conversation turned to boxing, to the heavyweight division’s golden age and, in particular, to Muhammad Ali, Louisville’s greatest son, whose cultural centre and museum opened in 2005. “I saw Ali take Ernie Terrell apart in Houston in 1967,” said Greg, a mining engineer who had been giving me gold-panning tips over an Old Weller Antique 107. “He’d changed his name from Cassius Clay by then, but Terrell wouldn’t call him Ali, so Ali fought as dirty as I’d ever seen him fight, gouging, spitting, shouting ‘What’s my name?’ every time he got a shot in.”

I could have stayed there for months, but I was late for a date at the Old Seelbach Bar with one of its most celebrated drinkers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Legend has it – and is not about to be dissuaded – that this hotel bar, restored as a Beaux Arts time capsule of the Roaring Twenties, was one of Fitzgerald’s haunts, and that it, and the people he met there, inspired The Great Gatsby.

Hotel historian Larry Johnson, in frock coat and ascot, guided me round with the courtly glide of a ballroom dancer, then settled me on a stool and ordered me a Seelbach². The man beside me, whose face suggested a long private war against levity, emitted a sigh of professional bitterness.

“I don’t get what’s so special about writers,” he said. “They lie for a living. The better the writer, the bigger the liar.” If he meant it as banter, his grey, pitted face offered no supporting evidence.

I asked whether his wife had run off with a writer. At that, he drained his Coors Light and left, his stool wobbling behind him, denying me the chance to discover whether she would at least entertain the possibility.

PROOF ON MAIN, the bar-restaurant at my hotel, 21c, was remarkably good value. The hotel doubles as a contemporary art gallery, so the people drinking there were often the people hanging on the walls. Outside stood a double-sized gold David, as if Michelangelo had taken a commission from Caesars Palace. Behind reception, four Judy Fox sculptures of mythical figures as naked children were offending about a third of the guests at any given moment.

In the lobby I got talking to Darius, a Black guy in museum glasses and a Cardinals cap, a friend of the textile artist Ebony Patterson, who was exhibiting there. A baseball obsessive, he had just come back from the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, a hundred yards away, and was plainly distressed. He had learned that a green beetle from Asia was chewing its way through the ash forests that had once furnished the game with its bats.

His granddad used to take him to ball games, he said, and he spoke with the helpless disgust of a man watching a bug eat its way through the grain of his childhood. “The Slugger, man – it made baseball what it was. Swung by Ernie Banks and Derek Jeter. It made a sound – a real crack – that no composite bat ever could.”

I bought him a bourbon at the bar. No connoisseur, he sniffed it quizzically, took a sip and something in his face gave way. “To your granddad,” I said. Darius smiled so wide that, for a moment, I felt the old man had appeared over my shoulder.

MY FAVOURITE THING to do in the city was also the most sobering. In that hour of splendid idleness between the death of daylight and the onset of night, when the whole world seems briefly to forget its appointments, Helen and I would walk to Waterfront Park and stand by the Ohio River to catch dusk getting ready, teasing out its layers of violet and charcoal tulle.

Before the Civil War, this riverfront was one of the Underground Railroad’s last and most perilous crossings. The Ohio marked the fault line between enslavement in Kentucky and a measure of liberty in the free states.

The ghosts of the fleeing still gather there, hoping to pass as mist on the water.

¹ The Silver Dollar closed on November 15, 2025.

² Adam Seger, then a bartender at the Seelbach Hotel, claimed in the mid-1990s to have discovered the recipe for the Seelbach on an old hotel menu, complete with a pleasing backstory about it having been the hotel’s pre-Prohibition signature drink. He later confessed that this history was fabricated to generate business and burnish his own reputation, though not before the drink had already been embalmed in cocktail mythology by Ted Haigh in Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails.

The recipe: add 1 ounce of bourbon, preferably Old Forester, 1/2 ounce of Cointreau, 4 dashes of Peychaud’s bitters and 3 dashes of Angostura bitters to a mixing glass with ice and stir until well chilled. Strain into a Champagne flute, top with cold Champagne or other sparkling wine and garnish with a long orange twist.

El Helicoide: architecturally, an extraordinary ruin of mid-century modernist ambition. Politically, one of the most notorious symbols of repression in modern Venezuela

Shock and succession

On the night of January 3, U.S. forces launched a high-intensity assault on Caracas that paired airstrikes with a special-forces raid and ended with Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores – no mere consort, but a former attorney general and one of the old guard’s key operators – in U.S. custody.

By Washington’s own telling, the mission was of remarkable scale – more than 150 aircraft from 20 bases – and tightly sequenced: air defences and military targets taken out first, then Maduro’s extraction, under the code name Operation Absolute Resolve.

The operation’s legal and political cover was shaky from the start. Trump sold it as a law-enforcement strike on “narco-terrorism”, then in the same breath said the United States would “run” Venezuela until a proper transition could be arranged.

He was no less candid about oil, presenting U.S. companies as the vehicles through which Venezuela’s energy sector would be rebuilt and its reserves reopened. That mix – extraterritorial force wrapped in criminal-process language, followed by an openly managerial approach towards another country’s political and economic future – has hung over every decision since.

In a New York dispute over Venezuelan state funds, prosecutors relied on a State Department filing recognising Delcy Rodríguez, the former vice president, as the country’s sole head of state. That gives legal teeth to the language of succession: it shapes who may speak for the state, who may control its assets and whose authority Washington is prepared to treat as real.

Maduro’s appearance in Manhattan on March 26 brought that abstraction down to earth. The judge questioned the rationale for blocking his access to Venezuelan funds for his defence, but refused to throw out the case. No subsequent hearing date had been publicly reported at the time of writing.

Cuanto más cambian las cosas…

Given all the “post-Maduro” chatter, you could be forgiven for thinking a revolution had taken place, that a new – benign – order had dawned. But institutional continuity inside Venezuela was apparent almost immediately. Rodríguez, until then vice president and oil minister, and before that a seasoned fixture within Chavista governments, took office on January 5. The National Assembly stayed put. So did the ruling party.

The machinery of repression is still running. A U.N. fact-finding mission has said there are “no indicators of structural reforms or change”. Since January 3, it has received reports of at least 87 new politically motivated detentions, including 14 journalists and media workers temporarily arrested while covering Rodríguez’s swearing-in, and at least 27 people detained for allegedly celebrating Maduro’s fall, among them 15 children.

Between September and December 2025, the same U.N. mission documented 135 alleged arbitrary detentions and kept investigating torture, sexual and gender-based violence, and abuse in detention centres and so-called “safe houses”. Changing the name at the top has not changed how the state polices opposition.

The Amnesty Law is the regime’s preferred exhibit in the case for its having taken a gentler turn. Rodríguez unveiled it at the end of January, complete with a promise that El Helicoide – the spiral modernist hulk in Caracas, conceived as a shopping centre and repurposed as the intelligence services’ most infamous prison – would become a centre for sport and social services. But by the time the law passed in February, it had been narrowed and heavily qualified, leaving many detainees beyond its reach, especially those still facing charges such as military rebellion linked to 2019.

A March cabinet reshuffle showed that big changes were not on the horizon. Rodríguez removed Vladimir Padrino López after more than a decade as defence minister and replaced him with Gustavo González López, the intelligence veteran she had already elevated in January to the presidential guard and the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM). Other portfolios, including housing and electric energy, were also reassigned. To the same end: entrenchment, not renewal.

Rodríguez strengthened her hold on the coercive apparatus without diminishing figures such as interior minister Diosdado Cabello, who remains a major force beyond the formal rearrangement, with influence running through the security services and the colectivos. One intelligence source said the intention was to keep the “relationship with the Americans” inside a trusted inner circle.

There is, arguably, more public space than there was in the late Maduro years – enough, at least, for grassroots discontent to express itself again. Friends in Caracas describe renewed student protests, with demands that go well beyond prisoner releases to the repeal of the “hate speech” and terrorism laws long used to criminalise dissent.

Widespread conflict and deprivation have survived Maduro. There is no civil war, but neither is there any clean monopoly of force. In the borderlands and the mining zones, criminal networks, guerrilla groups such as the ELN and dissident FARC, and parts of the state coexist in a murky ecosystem of overlapping rackets. The consequences reach well beyond those territories. Nearly 7.9 million Venezuelans have left the country, while many who remain still face privation, fragile public services and an economy living in the long shadow of hyperinflation.

The Venezuelan Finance Observatory put poverty at 86 per cent in 2024. By early 2025, it said a basic family food basket had risen to about $526.83. Venezuelans who have lived through years of this may hope renewed U.S. investment will ease the pressure, but the money is going first where Washington’s interests lie – oil – and there is little reason yet to think it will soon be felt in the pay packet, the food shop or the life of the average worker.

Relief on Washington’s terms

Nowhere has post-Maduro power declared itself more quickly than in the management of Venezuela’s oil. On March 18, the Treasury Department issued a general licence allowing U.S. companies to transact broadly with PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company, but only on terms written and enforced in Washington: U.S. law governs, revenues move through U.S.-controlled accounts and the protective ring around Citgo and other strategic U.S.-based assets remains intact. The licence excludes transactions with sanctioned entities and with persons linked to Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Russia.

This licensing structure rests on a late-January reform of Venezuela’s hydrocarbons law that handed foreign partners unusual autonomy, allowing them to operate, export and cash proceeds even as minority partners in PDVSA ventures. It set off an immediate rush for contracts and project expansions, with Chevron and Shell moving fast towards the first major new production deals of the post-Maduro period.

The new deal is not limited to oil. In March, Venezuela signed “strategic” gas agreements with Repsol and Eni covering Cardón IV, which Rodríguez cast as a step towards higher production and possible export growth. Eni’s chief executive, Claudio Descalzi, then made plain what sanctions relief meant in practice: Venezuela could once again pay for gas with oil. That may sound technical, but it is more revealing than that. It shows how quickly sanctions, once eased, are repurposed from blunt prohibition into managed channels for payment, debt recovery and leverage.

The oil map is already being redrawn. Shipping data showed a sharp February drop in exports to Asia, partly offset by rising direct shipments to the United States and a jump in exports to Europe, where Repsol led purchases. More tellingly, the same data showed cargoes moving on Washington’s terms, with vessel traffic pointing to another acceleration in March. That is what the new order looks like in practice: not the end of control, but its redirection.

Any rapid recovery story still runs up against the physical condition of the energy system. In February, Venezuela’s refineries were running at roughly 35 per cent of installed capacity – an improvement on last year, but still nowhere near enough to meet domestic demand with any confidence. The network remains vulnerable to power cuts and mechanical failure, so the old threat of fuel scarcity and rationing persists.

Outside oil and gas, the economy still bears all the marks of a sanctions economy. Smaller firms, unable to secure dollars through official auctions, are turning instead to the black market and to crypto simply to stay in business. Inflation is running at around 600 per cent annualised, and central-bank dollar sales are down year on year. That is the accumulated residue of financial isolation, opaque allocation and survivalist workarounds.

Asset control is where Washington’s management of the aftermath becomes tangible. On March 19, the U.S. extended creditor protections for Citgo through early May while presenting the broader PDVSA licence as pro-investment and protective of strategic assets. Yet Citgo remains trapped in a Delaware court-run sale of its parent company, designed to compensate creditors pursuing Venezuela for defaults and expropriations. An Elliott affiliate still stands to take control, but the transfer cannot happen unless OFAC grants a further specific licence. Real control lies in deciding when and how a strategic Venezuelan asset changes hands.

The Caracas–Havana axis

The Venezuela–Cuba alliance rested on a simple exchange: oil for Cuba, expertise and security for Venezuela. Beneath that sat a deeper compact, one that embedded Cuban intelligence in Venezuelan coercive institutions, including DGCIM. That is why the 32 Cuban citizens killed in the U.S. raid and extraction, whom Havana described as members of its armed forces and intelligence services, were not collateral dead but the human price of years of coup-proofing.

Since Maduro’s capture, Washington has treated the severing of Caracas–Havana ties as a core objective. Breaking Venezuela’s relationship with Cuba was openly cast as part of a broader strategy to weaken Havana and oil shipments to the island were cut off from mid-December. The practical consequences were swift: Cuban advisers were pushed out of sensitive posts, including inside DGCIM; doctors and security personnel began leaving Venezuela; and Rodríguez distanced herself from the Cuban security architecture on which earlier leaders had relied.

At the same time, the relationship has not simply been switched off. Some Cuban personnel remain active in Venezuela and Rodríguez still has to weigh U.S. demands against the risk of unsettling her own coalition and straining an alliance structure on which the Chávez–Maduro order long relied. U.S. intelligence reporting in late January reduced the issue to its essentials: not whether Washington wanted a full break with Cuba, China, Russia and Iran, but whether Rodríguez could afford to make one.

The new Cuban emergency

Cuba’s current emergency is what happens when fuel denial collides with infrastructure already close to ruin. The grid failed on March 16, was patched back together after a blackout lasting more than 29 hours, then failed again on March 21 – a second nationwide collapse in a week and the third major outage in March alone

The decrepit network matters, but the more immediate pressure is external. Washington has cut off Venezuelan oil, discouraged other sellers and left even Russian relief entangled in sanctions policy. Russia now says it is sending fuel as humanitarian aid (a Russian tanker carrying an estimated 730,000 barrels of oil is due to reach Cuba on Tuesday). Each restoration is therefore only a stay of execution. Power returns, briefly, to a system otherwise incapable of sustaining itself.

The blockade is not rhetorical. By mid-March, Cuba had gone three months without fuel imports, most people were enduring daily blackouts, and ship-tracking data showed only two oil tankers reaching the island all year. Washington then threatened tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba, while Mexico – a crucial recent supplier – halted shipments and retreated to humanitarian aid instead. Russia’s fuel aid does not alter the larger reality: the deliberate throttling of an energy-starved state.

The Cuban response has been one of rationing, prioritisation and damage control. In February the state moved to protect what it considers essential – healthcare, water, agriculture, education and defence – while trying to keep tourism and cigar exports alive as sources of foreign currency. Infant care centres and primary schools remained open, while secondary and higher education shifted towards hybrid timetables as the crisis deepened.

Before the oil embargo, Cuba was already buckling under a longstanding trade and financial squeeze, whose effects are written most plainly in the country’s demography. Since 2021, the island has haemorrhaged people on a record scale. The population is now thought to be below 9 million, down from more than 10 million in Cuba’s 2023 census estimate.

The same crisis has forced the state to improvise. Private businesses, authorised only since 2021, have grown so fast that they now account for more retail sales by value than the state, and in mid-March Havana invited exiles to invest in and own businesses on the island too. Washington’s reply was to permit tightly controlled fuel exports to Cuba’s private sector. This is not only punishment. It is an attempt to loosen the state’s hold on parts of Cuban society and turn energy into an instrument of political engineering.

Social stability is beginning to fray. In Morón, a protest over blackouts and food shortages began peacefully, then tipped into vandalism and arson at the local Communist Party office, with furniture and documents dragged into the street and set alight. Five arrests followed. It was a rare outburst of public dissent and a reminder that in Cuba infrastructure failure is now almost always political.

One of Cuba’s few reliable sources of foreign exchange, tourism – including the annual cigar festival – has taken a direct hit from the fuel crisis. Varadero’s empty beaches now stand in for the wider damage: around 1,700 cancelled flights at the height of winter, hotel closures and consolidations, and even Russian carriers pulling out when jet fuel could no longer be assured.

Washington’s position in the current talks with Havana is narrow, transactional and heavily conditioned. U.S. officials have reportedly floated the removal of President Miguel Díaz-Canel as part of a possible deal, while Havana insists that neither his term nor Cuba’s political system is up for negotiation. Beyond that, the offer is tightly bounded: limited openings for the private sector, tightly controlled fuel exports outside the state’s hands, and no restoration of the government’s wider energy lifeline. Relief, in other words, is on offer only where it fragments the state rather than sustains it.

War first, law later

International law criticism has been difficult to dismiss. António Guterres, the U.N. Secretary-General, called the January 3 action a “dangerous precedent” and the argument has scarcely shifted since: without Security Council authorisation, Venezuelan consent or a credible self-defence case, the legal basis is close to vanishing. Washington cited Article 51. The U.N., while finding reasonable grounds to believe Maduro’s government had committed crimes against humanity, still judged the intervention unlawful.

The American-Israeli war with Iran has thrown fresh light on the impulsiveness of Washington’s strategy in the Western Hemisphere as well as the Middle East. What links Iran to Venezuela, and by extension to Cuba, is not some grandly coherent plan but a reckless confidence in shock action followed by improvised administration: strike first, patch together the legal case afterwards, then use sanctions, licences, asset controls and economic choke points to impose order on the wreckage. The claim to humanitarian concern is part of the cover. Washington feigns anxiety for Venezuelans and Iranians alike, then thinks nothing of their welfare when their suffering becomes strategically useful.

In that sense, Venezuela is not a side theatre to Iran but part of the same attempt to manage the consequences of escalation by other means: a source of barrels, leverage and temporary relief as war with Iran batters energy markets and exposes how thin America’s supposed insulation really is.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that the ongoing assault on Iran, which appears to rest on legal ground scarcely firmer than the action in Venezuela, can be finished in “weeks, not months” and without ground troops carries the same faith in compressed time and manageable aftermath that marked the attack on Caracas. The pattern is forever mistaking the ability to disrupt for the ability to settle. The risk is that Iran confirms what Venezuela already implied – that Washington is discovering that multiple fronts of intervention are easier to ignite than to resolve.

David Seabrook, right, and Xavier Driffield

A FRIEND AND I started our wee book business in inauspicious circumstances – namely Sittingbourne, a commuter town not widely regarded as the Bloomsbury of north Kent. Within eighteen months, though, against commercial logic and ordinary expectation alike, we had done well enough to open a second branch in Canterbury, which meant one shop each and twice the scope for error.

We called the enterprise Past Sentence, a nod to our petty criminal pasts – at the bottom of the bookmarks ran the legend “We’ve got previous” – but it took more than a show of fairly obnoxious cheek to keep the shops afloat.

Misplaced pride goeth before liquidation.

The name was not cursed, though. It was kept by the trader who bought the Sittingbourne stock, fittings and sign, then reopened in Faversham, where it still trades and comes warmly recommended by me. You could, it seemed, take the business at fascia value after all.

Wearily opens a big box of groans

The Canterbury branch, on the corner of St Peter’s Street – the indie end of the high street – and The Friars, just above the Marlowe Theatre, went under not long after the Cathedral, a major commercial landlord with responsibility for both souls and square footage, withdrew its small business unit relief and took my profit margin with it. Absolution, I discovered, does not cover overheads.

In its final year, the shop took a turn for the unruly, doubling variously as an unlicensed bar, doss house, poker school and grow-op. It was also the favoured haunt of a notorious shoplifter called Tony Pickup, whose name remains the most persuasive argument for nominative determinism I’ve yet encountered.

After Black Books premiered on Channel 4 in 2000, I grew used to former customers, fellow dealers and sundry friends asking how I felt about Dylan Moran’s portrayal of me as a bibulous incompetent with open disdain for the general public and a wardrobe seemingly pinched from a bereaved scarecrow.

How did I feel? Seen, frankly, and not in any sense that might be called affirming. And I could have done with a boost, because I was broke and of no fixed abode – the Scarlet Pimpernel of bailiffs – for a good while. Then the sitcom, and Bernard Black especially, became a cult favourite; I picked up my first proper writing jobs in Mexico, to which I’d decamped as soon as I scraped together the air fare; and my memories of that winter above the shop – the utilities cut off, jacket potatoes as bed-warmers, my breath making tortuous sculptures in the air – took on a certain garret glamour.

ANYWAY… what a word “anyway” is. A verbal broom. A curt usher sweeping the stage and striking earlier testimony from the record. Ooh, look at him go… I like the set of his moue, his little jacket and the way he shoots his cuffs.

That almost calls for another one.

Canterbury’s reputation for bookishness survived the fall of my retail empire. Readers remain well looked after and its writers well remembered. Joseph Conrad lies in Canterbury Cemetery as Joseph Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, a couple of hundred yards from my friend Maximum MacGillycuddy Maurice Martin, whose gifts were tallied too late for fame (more on him here). Christopher Marlowe, a native son, has a theatre to remind us. And Aphra Behn – the first professional female writer in English and sometime spy for Charles II – now has a bronze statue and the imprimatur of Netflix (Monstrous Beauty, with Fiona Shaw as Behn, is in development).

Of course, Geoffrey Chaucer stamped the city indelibly on the map of English letters. The Canterbury Tales helped legitimise vernacular writing at a time when Latin and French still held sway, and its title has since become a metonym for the form I’ve come to specialise in: storytelling on the move.

There’s even a Wetherspoon with literary pedigree: The Thomas Ingoldsby, named for the pseudonym of Richard Harris Barham, who was born just across the street. Barham, once curate of Snargate on Romney Marsh, spun comic-Gothic tales of spectres, smugglers and ecclesiastical scandal, first published serially in Bentley’s Miscellany and later collected as The Ingoldsby Legends.

The pub honours that inheritance more faithfully than it realises. It’s one of the rougher Wetherspoons – a crowded field – and its clientele seems assembled from Canterbury’s least wanted: the reliably bigoted, the invariably brutish and the definitely barred elsewhere. In the cavernous gents they loiter like ghouls in a vault, knocking out cheap gear to one another under interrogation lighting.

At least Barham’s ghosts had the dignity of being dead.

BETWEEN PUTTING together window displays devoted to sex cult and satanic panic paperbacks, glugging from a bottle of Langhe Nebbiolo and watching the father and two sons from the Gold & Diamond Exchange next door thrash out their disputes over women in coked-up fistfights, I made a surprising number of friends during my time at the shop.

I saw a lot of David Seabrook, an adoptive Cantuarian, while he was writing the book for which he is best known, All the Devils Are Here, a darkly digressive journey through northeast Kent’s cultural undergrowth. He would work in monastic solitude for a fortnight, then surface for air, talk and to barter, swapping unread review copies of the latest fiction for house clearance spoils: unfinished memoirs, love letters, crank tracts, dissertations from abandoned degrees and any other paper relic with derangement running through it.

Then we would go out drinking and Seabrook, in skinhead, Crombie and a state of near-comic agitation, would spill the book’s guts, showing me photographs and correspondence while fulminating against editorial attempts to knacker, hobble, fetter and stymie his work – all in the name, so far as I could tell, of narrative coherence, consistency of voice and smoother transitions between chapters. In the end, I was relieved to read, the book won.

Seabrook’s intermittent need for company was really a need to marshal his thoughts, and the only conversation he could tolerate was largely one-sided. It was as though he were debriefing himself after two weeks spent illuminating the horrors of contemporary Kentish life, with my role reduced to second fiddle – a badly made balsa thing that had never been tuned.

His distrust of the publishing industry was of a piece with his generally suspicious nature. Six drinks in, however, his paranoia would peak and, fiercely protective of his scoops, he would begin to suspect he had revealed too much. He would vanish in the small hours, his face forming a fist. A few days later I would find a note under the shop door reassuring me that I was not, after all, a thief, a leech, a vampire or whatever other charge he had been privately nursing.

For all that, I liked Seabrook enormously. He was not without charm, decency or feeling, even if he was constitutionally incapable of putting them on. His book reflected that, following – by public transport – a map of his obsessions east of the River Medway and airing them nakedly enough to amount to a self-portrait.

It is, then, a kind of gazetteer of English disreputability: an infernal filing cabinet crammed with lowlife folklore, a patricidal painter, literary ghosts, washed-up entertainers, fallen socialites, Nazi collaborators, bent coppers and Seabrook himself, trade on the turn.

“Max Bygraves wants to tell you a story. I’ll tell you a fucking story… ”

ON ITS RELEASE IN 2002, All the Devils Are Here drew a modest fanfare from the small brass section of the London literary fringe – a loose fraternity of writers, critics, editors and ophicleidists whom Seabrook had, over fifteen years, identified as allies, written to and occasionally doorstepped on his rare – because costly – visits to London. Chief among them was Iain Sinclair.

Because the label had fastened itself to Sinclair for the better part of a decade, Devils was hailed as a work of “psychogeography”. The culture – a generous term for the publishing industry – prefers a movement to a man: there’s more money in it while it lasts, more titles to shift. The term had the right pedigree – the Situationist International, 1950s Paris – and Sinclair had the erudition and outsider taste to wear it. He also kept the right company: figures such as Stewart Home, house vandal of the British avant-garde, gleefully kicking the furniture of art, politics and literature down the stairs.

In truth, very few writers work the same ground as Sinclair, whatever they choose to call it, and fewer still make such startling use of occult topography, literary history and obsessive walking. He gave Seabrook the nod, in effect, to trust his own compulsions. Devils benefited greatly from the way Lights Out for the Territory had rearranged readers’ expectations of what a book about place could do. And though Seabrook’s journeys are not quite dérives, they yoke place and psyche together as though they were one.

By the time psychogeography became the title of a Will Self column in The Independent, the term was effectively bankrupt and its prospects were not improved by a writer whose vocabulary stands like a toll booth before comprehension and lets so little music through. The practice still has its YouTube adherents, though, ready to wear out their Hush Puppies arguing that the North Circular is the Via Dolorosa and each of its roundabouts a Station of the Cross.

Seabrook could be withering about how he was regarded by his own literary circle, and he had every right. Many of the early notices implied that he belonged to the very world Devils sets out to anatomise. It showed his critics for what they are: dabblers in the dark stuff, long addicted to shadiness provided it keeps a safe distance.

I last saw him for a drink in October 2007, a week after a Tiger Lillies gig at the Gulbenkian Theatre at the University of Kent. A paperback edition of his second book, Jack of Jumps – his account of the still-unsolved “Jack the Stripper” murders of the 1960s – had just come out. It was admired for its forensic grip on the material, though Stewart Home accused Seabrook of trying to have it both ways: refusing to identify the killer outright while leaving readers little trouble in guessing whom he meant.

And Seabrook was much less coy about the victims, describing the murdered women in grisly detail. I told him the new book could have done with some of Devils’ fractured empathy, because what Jack had was uncomfortably close to contempt. He threw up his hands, protesting, “Look, it needed a different approach. It’s a period piece, really. And I’m not in it this time.” I hoped he wasn’t.

He then changed the subject to his current project, a book about the showbusiness solicitor David Jacobs. Found hanged at his house in Hove in 1968, Jacobs had earlier asked for police protection, telling a private detective he was “in terrible trouble” and that “they’re all after me”. The case refused to die because Jacobs moved in murky waters: Beatles business, the Profumo-era underworld and clients with every reason to fear exposure. “I’ve had a few weird phone calls about this one,” Seabrook said.

Within 15 months Seabrook, just 48, was gone, found dead in his Canterbury flat. At the insistence of his devout parents, the funeral at Barham Crematorium near Chilham was conducted by a man who had never known him. He delivered a sermon of sanctimonious generalities so ill-suited to the deceased that all it lacked was a lugubrious chuckle from the coffin.

I have often wondered what became of Seabrook’s library, his papers and the Jacobs manuscript. If anyone knows where they ended up, do let me know.

The Cardinal and the Corpse, 1992, Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit

BETWEEN 1992 AND 2000, Sinclair and Chris Petit made three films together: The Cardinal and the Corpse, The Falconer and Asylum. They share faces, fixations and a distressed-pulp aesthetic, though only the first concerns us here. Made for Channel 4, The Cardinal and the Corpse is a forty-minute documentary of sorts set amid the more raffish reaches of London’s rare-book trade.

For anyone who has read White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings – Sinclair’s 1987 novel – the film feels like a shambolic return to that world, a séance for the living in which a tuneless choir of well-worn voices is summoned to talk over itself. It is not a comedy, but it is often funny without anyone stooping to a punchline or, in the case of one “guest”, even getting the joke.

The pair of dealers at the heart of the film also haunt the novel: Martin Stone, transmuted into Nicholas Lane, a gifted seeker and former Pink Fairies guitarist, and Xavier Driffield, recast as Dryfeld, the hustling, scavenging underside of the trade made flesh, who produced the tartly opinionated secondhand bookshop directories known as Driff’s Guides. Sinclair acted as chauffeur to both men. “Driving these boys around,” he said, “I picked up enough material to let them write a book for me.”

As a pseudo-Dickensian teenager – by which I mean a street kid with an educated eye for collectibles, the impulse control of a magpie and therefore something to offload – I would often spot Driff, dressed like an Edwardian swell at the 19th hole, badgering the stallholders of Farringdon Road and the shopkeepers of Cecil Court and Charing Cross Road. One day he intercepted me outside Henry Purdes Books, searched my rucksack and gave me £50 for a VG/VG UK first of Ladies Whose Bright Eyes by Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford).

I’ll spare you further detail about the documentary, since it can be watched above, save to note that it rounds up a generous swathe of Sinclair’s tribe at the time: Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, David Seabrook, Robin Cook – better known as Derek Raymond – Emanuel Litvinoff and Alexander Baron from the literary side; John Latham and Brian Catling from the art world; Kray lieutenant Tony Lambrianou; and the dealers Gerry and Pat Goldstein.

Sinclair had his own secondhand book stall in Camden Passage, Islington, trading out of the antiques market there. He knows that the true keys to a city turn up in junk boxes, attics and cellars. The rest is a kind of fakelore: the authorised version, imposed from above. Hence the peculiar authority of his narratives, which seem to assemble London, in fact or fiction, from torn pages and overheard testimony, splicing high cultural reference into the demotic without any change of register.

Insofar as he could be known, Martin Stone became an increasingly fugitive presence until his death in Versailles in 2016, though he played music almost to the end. Driffield was another matter. Most people knew him through a self-mythologising public persona he managed almost like a franchise, and in his occasional dealings with the press he took care to present his own story as intentionally unreliable. That gave him licence to disappear when it suited him. The last public trace I can find is in the courts: in 2014, aged 65, he stood trial on multiple sexual offence charges. He was subsequently cleared.

I NOW LIVE ON “PLANET THANET” – that seaside conurbation of Broadstairs, Margate and Ramsgate – where Devils begins with T.S. Eliot, a nervous convalescent on Margate Sands, writing The Waste Land and connecting “nothing with nothing”.

The book was out of print by the time Backlisted, the literary podcast, devoted an episode to it in April 2016, a discussion later credited with helping to secure Granta’s reissue two years on. Thanet’s souvenir shops stock it now. Seabrook would have taken obscene pleasure in signing copies sold as travel guides – “the hard-boiled Baedeker”.

The panel also agreed that the dark currents of Devils have found harsher expression in Kent since. Certainly, it has given me plenty to write about. But I owe my life here more than the six crime novels it might have made possible.

I came back from the U.S. almost four years ago to a lung cancer diagnosis. Ramsgate seemed the sort of place in which one might recover, or failing that, decline photogenically. It has a Royal Harbour, a Victorian waterfront and hills possessed of a brute faith in their restorative powers.

I’m due to return to the States in a couple of months, and perhaps that is what has prompted this retrospective. The thought of leaving Ramsgate has broken, in my mind, its association with illness. Even so, the town’s own outlook is bleak.

THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND has always had a siege mentality. Given it’s the gateway and guardroom too, its mindset is as old as geography. At its narrowest, the English Channel is just 18 miles across: a thin sliver of water, but a serviceably wide margin for hostility and mistrust. On a clear day you can read France like a tabloid headline.

Despite what The Darling Buds of May would have us believe, Kent was a long way from “perfick” before ITV ladled syrup over the novels of H. E. Bates¹ in the early Nineties. With its Saxon Shore forts, Martello towers, gun pits, anti-aircraft batteries, sound mirrors, observation posts, plotting rooms and tunnels, it carries itself like a county on a war footing.

And it sounds like one too. Wherever you go in Thanet, it is plain the place has contracted a virulent strain of the manipulated disaffection now loose across the country. In its pubs, the regulars can be relied upon to recite the stock falsehoods of the tabloids, GB News and the street-fascist wing of social media as if they were weather reports: grooming gangs living in luxury, church bells silenced for Ramadan, invasion imminent, Sharia law around the corner.

In May, I went to the Royal Harbour to watch sixty-five of the original Little Ships set sail for Dunkirk on the eighty-fifth anniversary of Operation Dynamo. I assured my friend Diyar, who generally avoided the seafront, that the occasion would be suitably reverential and that he had nothing to fear. This was a man who had served with the Peshmerga, the Kurdish forces that defended northern Iraq against ISIS, before leaving for Britain with his daughter after her mother was killed. So much for the dignity of the occasion. His fine features, bronze skin and black hair made him an immediate target for racist abuse and threats of violence.

He gave me a weary smile, as if ignorance had exhausted his powers of objection. “It’s always the same. People here are mad about war – especially the ones who’ve never been in one. They talk about the Battle of Britain as if they’d just won it themselves.”

Some Thanetians regard their prejudices as a birthright and the airing of them as a form of service. They are the Home Guard reborn, planted on the coast, glaring seaward and shouting at the surf. Thanet, after all, is where most people arriving by small boat are first taken for processing at Manston, an old RAF site just inland from Ramsgate, and from that administrative reality certain locals have manufactured a whole mythology of siege.

The politicisation of this misplaced Blitz spirit is recent. UKIP made the first real breakthrough in Thanet, topping the local European poll in 2014 and helping drive Tory PM David Cameron towards the referendum. Nigel Farage lost South Thanet in 2015, though the party briefly took Thanet District Council before unravelling. Brexit finished UKIP only by clearing the ground for its successor. Farage launched the Brexit Party in 2019, won that year’s European elections, then failed to turn that into parliamentary clout. Rebranded as Reform UK in 2021, it widened its pitch beyond Brexit and by 2024 had won five Westminster seats on 14.3 per cent of the vote. A year later it took 677 council seats, ten councils and two mayoralties.

Reform won 57 seats at Kent County Council in May 2025. Since then, suspensions, expulsions, leaks and defections have ripped through the bloc, and a seven-member Restore Britain group has emerged from the wreckage. Kent is now a case study in how fast grievance politics turns cannibal.

I’ve attended more than a few anti-immigration protests staged by the men and maids of Kent whose racism no longer feels adequately represented in mainstream politics, despite its grievous lurch to the right, and who have answered this supposed disenfranchisement by taking to the streets wrapped in flags, fury and the consoling fiction that they, rather than the people they menace, are the injured party.

In the beginning, with the Raise the Colours campaign, some of those marching could still pass as decent citizens, reluctantly driven into action by elite contempt. The campaign was clever – about as close as British nationalism has come to a PR exercise. The flag was a front, with plausible deniability stitched into every fold. It no longer convinces. What is the appeal of standing alongside people for whom convictions for racial abuse, assault and domestic violence are badges of honour? I wouldn’t trust them with anything more sentient than a fruit machine.

Having worked undercover in far-right enclaves across the United States – Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Pocahontas County, West Virginia; Harrison, Arkansas – I know what radicalisation looks like. It is rife in Britain too, only with a distinctly transatlantic accent. The Unite the Kingdom rally in London, fronted by Tommy Robinson, showed the far right in its current form: less a local pathology than a global franchise in an American mould. Elon Musk appeared by video to call for the dissolution of Parliament and warn that “violence is coming”. It was an apt cameo in a movement now fed by the same currents of money, platform power and conspiracist excitement.

The talking points are always the same. Everyone is watching the same crap. Great Replacement theory. HAARP, chemtrails and weather manipulation. Anti-vaccine delirium. Child-trafficking cabals, except Epstein’s, which somehow ceases to count the moment Trump is implicated. The “plandemic”. These are no longer entertained one by one, like private eccentricities, but swallowed wholesale as a complete worldview. Pokémon rules apply: you’ve got to believe them all.

So for Kent I shall do whatever I do instead of pray, and hope that on my return it still has some living claim on my heart. I wish it rest. To treat every demographic wobble – even another influx of DFLs² – as a civilisational emergency must be soul-sapping.

Elections have done their damage for now, though Cliftonville – a Margate division often called “Kosoville” by people who couldn’t find Kosovo on a map of Kosovo – goes to a county council by-election on April 9. The vacancy arose after Daniel Taylor, the Reform councillor, was jailed for controlling and coercive behaviour towards his wife, in a case that also heard allegations of threats to kill. Restore Britain has said it will contest the seat.

FOR THE NEXT YEAR I shall be a lone figure in the American sublime, there chiefly to act as a temporary unit of insignificance: prey to awe, terror and exaltation in the face of the colossal, the abyssal and the overwhelming, feeling wholly diminished yet intensely alive. Well, not quite. I’ll be driving all over the States, many of them maddeningly populous, but I will be stumping up $250 for a non-resident America the Beautiful pass, arriving just as the Trump administration has scrubbed the national parks of “divisive” interpretation, particularly signage dealing with slavery, Native dispossession or climate change.

Much as I love nature at its wildest – having watched the entire run of Grizzly Adams as a toddler, I was recruited early to the cult of bears, mountains and hermit grandeur – if it is peace I am after, I return in my mind, navigating the traps and snares I set for psychic snoops, shrinks and G-men, to the chalk downland of Kent: specifically, the 358.3 hectares of grassland, woodland and scrub designated as the Wye and Crundale Downs Site of Special Scientific Interest, centred on the Devil’s Kneading Trough.

The Trough itself – the Devil being so often reduced, in place-names, to a domestic skivvy, forever fussing over punch bowls, dolly tubs and drip boards – is one of those steep-sided dry valleys cut by freeze and thaw at the end of the last Ice Age, a coombe seemingly scooped clean from the North Downs.

On the slopes grow harebells, wild marjoram and cowslips. On the wing are chalkhill and Adonis blues, marbled whites and Dukes of Burgundy. Some twenty orchid species hide out there, among them early spider, lady and pyramidal, while the Downs harbour about half the national population of late spider orchid. I sit over their colonies like a minor pagan deity, as though I had planted them myself, my expression making clear that any breach of their peace will be paid for in fingers.

The drama of the Downs lies in their minute perfection, as though a lapidary hand had placed them there: thin soil, vegetal breath, a mineral brightness, light skipping off the chalk like a settled debt. Few landscapes feel so austere and so abundant at once. By the time I leave, bluebells will be pooling in the beech woods, the new green of their leaves almost incandescent, and by high tide the nightingales³ will have returned to fling their songs at the May Queen as though she were curtseying and they were bouquets.

If I am killed in action – kissing in public, say, or playing knock-down-ginger – and bring out the Rupert Brooke in my mourners, this is the bit of England that some corner of a foreign field will for ever be: the Devil’s Kneading Trough, in Wye National Nature Reserve, Kent

¹ The TV adaptation turns the Larkins into a soft-focus national memory. The books are another matter entirely, driven by appetite: food, drink, sex, fertility, idleness, sunlight, bodily ease and a cheerful contempt for bureaucracy. Pop is a rural anarch, forever set against the pinched emissaries of managerial modernity. The Larkins live as though the state and polite society were minor irritants beside the older claims of the flesh, the weather and the season. In the first book, Charley the taxman is essentially absorbed into a fertility cult.

² Down from Londons

³ Kent is one of the few places in England where nightingales are still more than a memory. They usually arrive in mid-April after wintering in the hump of West Africa, between Sierra Leone and Senegal. Kent Wildlife Trust helps maintain the scrub habitat they need to breed and is notably less alarmed by migrants than some of the county’s human inhabitants.

THIS NEWSLETTER BEGAN – and still doubles – as the trailer and sidecar for a book, provisionally titled No Swimming at the Holiday Inn: Waking Up from the American Dream One Motel at a Time (Holiday Inn’s silence is not, as far as I know, a licensing arrangement). But in practice it has become my preferred outlet – a place where I can write what I want, how I want; at length and depth, sans topical gift wrap.

It is also proof of continued existence. That may sound melodramatic, given its bloody obviousness, but the obvious is not always convincing. A life can keep running on paper while the person inside it goes missing. This Substack, then, is my pin dropped, again and again: I’m here. I’ve still got it. Got what? If nothing else, what Nina Simone possessed in ferocious excess – life.

Based in New Orleans four years ago, I began to feel sicker than even someone with an extensive history of bad habits has any right to. Whatever was happening, it was beyond the restorative abilities of jump leads, gaffer tape and positive thinking. The body, it turns out, keeps its own books, and mine were suddenly overdue. So I headed back to the UK.

Within the year, I was in the system, getting confirmation that I was right to return: bronchial adenomas in my left lung, small, slow, not quick to spread. Had I kept smarter company, a doctor friend might have told me that the flushing, chest pain and regular infections weren’t the booze alone.

Treatment took it out of me, but it also took me out of my own life, as if someone had slid a pane of glass between me and everything else. Convalescence – that endless measuring of old expectations against new limitations – is a bore. To survive it I needed something ahead of me, not behind. I could only get so excited about restoring a previous model: same dents, same defaults, same subscriptions. I wanted a new challenge, not the same ones with better lung capacity. An acoustic rebirth, everything slowed to a dignified chug, the knuckles gnarlier? No thanks.

So I wrote the proposal for No Swimming. It wasn’t a complicated labour. It was exactly what my recuperating self required – the prospect of getting back on the asphalt, doing what I do best. And I had the material. As a freelance journalist, I’d spent a decade living out of my car in 49 of the 50 United States, hopping freight trains when I ran out of fuel. One more marathon road trip and the book would write itself.

And so a vision of a non-fiction noir – tracking America’s shadow self across 50,000 miles of backroads – was released into the wild and, to my gratitude and renewed sense of purpose, came back with a publisher.

It takes the motel as its lens: a holding cell between rest and flight, between grace and relapse; between Highway to Heaven Ministries with Pastor Jim-Bob Clary on the radio and Killer Mysteries replaying blood spatter trajectories on cable. Through that peephole, America – riven, restless, increasingly turned on itself – flares into focus.

Please, don’t mistake me, I love America. I bow to a culture that has always been in righteous revolt against those who presume to govern, restrict or ban it. It has given the world uncountable riches – in people, art, books and music – despite the regular failures of its leadership and the unchecked cupidity of their backers. That the American dream is a lie – in fact, a debt-financed mirage – would not stop me believing in it under new management.

So the book is part billet doux, part coroner’s report. The motels are chosen with care, each a point of entry in a devastating autopsy of American life – race, guns, education, health, climate and the environment, drugs, housing, religion, Indigenous welfare. Together, they reveal a nation clinging to an image it has ceased to deserve.

For the Land of the Free, see the most incarcerated nation on Earth. For the Shining City on the Hill, a gated citadel, floodlit for itself. For Leader of the Free World, a merchant of war and sponsor of proxy conflicts. For a Marketplace of Ideas, an algorithmic outrage bazaar. For an Innovation Nation, a surveillance state with venture capital. And for such “native” values as frontier spirit and rugged individualism, we have land rush without end and social atomisation.

If the book drills down into the taproots of American decline, this Substack will stay above ground, ear to the dirt, tuned to right now, listening for stress fractures in the way the country carries itself – widening cracks in public faith, unhappy endings to the fairytales the country tells itself. And the work of ICE, wherever its officers gather in troubling number.

It will serve as a record of the current administration in the United States’ 250th year – live recordings from the set of This American Carnage, season two. The bunting may go up. As will the temperature.

No Forwarding Address – raw dispatches from the frontline of a republic seemingly bent on self-harm, then. But where there are people, there is hope, and I’ll be speaking to those whose voices matter because they live on the fault lines I’m mapping, not because they love the sound of them and won’t hand back the mic. Here I can publish what’s true, not merely what’s trending. The Great American Newsletter? A charming conceit.

I SUPPOSE THIS is your cue, readers. The better this does, the better I can do. We live in an age of institutionalised mendacity and digital retreat from the world of consequences. There has rarely been a greater need for journalists to do their job: to get out there, to hold America’s illusions up to the light and set human truth against the stagecraft of a soft-core dictatorship. And, given that Trump would have us question the official record, to keep the country’s memory. As luck has it, this is my vocation and I’ll follow it until one of us gives out, lovers to the end.

For now, No Forwarding Address is free, even if the cost of FOIA charges, fuel and body armour keep rising. To everyone who’s already offered to chip in: your generosity is noted and deeply felt; I just need to activate the payment link. As the miles rack up (along with the insurance premiums), I’ll roll out a few subscription tiers with genuine extras – photo essays, a monthly live Q&A, audio and video clips, playlists – and I’ll be taking story requests.

Until then, do me one kindness: circulate these dispatches to your friends, family and foes – anyone who’d rather chew glass than swallow spin (which is kind of a spinny line – apologies), anyone who prefers their journalism human, neat and unsponsored.

Cheers y’all,

Joe

On stage at the 10th Antibes–Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival in 1969: Nina Simone, piano; Weldon Irvine, organ; Don Alias, drums; and Clint Houston, bass. If I were a generation older, more of my friends might know that Nina Simone’s Ain't Got No, I Got Life began as two songs from the 1967 Broadway musical Hair, with music by Galt MacDermot and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni. But it’s Nina’s, really. She burns off the well-meaning late Sixties hippie pageant energy of the original – leaving something leaner, harder and lived

IT WAS JUNE 21 – Ullortuneq, “the longest day” and then some – and I was burning the midnight oil; though, strictly speaking, it was 2.30am and no oil was required.

Standing outside Zion’s Church in Ilulissat, Greenland, roughly 300km north of the Arctic Circle, I was frozen, but chiefly in a state of wonder. Two journalists stood with me and, looking out over Disko Bay, I asked them, “How could you not love disco?” Then, with an invitational shuffle, I slipped into the chorus of Alicia Bridges’ I Love the Nightlife.

Even as the icebergs ahead of us yawed on the tide, as if thinking about throwing some shapes of their own, my sweetly crooned entreaties failed to move my colleagues. A pity, as I later learned the Swiss are not immune to a Studio 54 banger.

I had the sight of sights to console me, however. The sun, a mirror ball of a million facets, was still a few degrees above the horizon and, improbably, rising. In Ilulissat it simply doesn’t set from about May 20 to July 23. Like a coin pressed to the rim of the world, it seemed to be conducting the last of the light on Earth.

At such a low angle the light takes a long cut, wading through the atmosphere until the blue end peters out. What reaches us is long-wave warmth. The ice catches it and throws it back in peach, brass and watered gold, the showier bergs going from monuments to lanterns.

That evening that never was, I was already more than usually moved when a humpback whale breached the gilt – its breath blooming white, fogging and beading in the frigid air – then rolled over as if it had surfaced purely to top up its tan. I assumed I was in heaven, though there by clerical error.

Marvelling in that way writers do, annoyed that the word had beaten the feeling to it, I settled into a thermos of Greenlandic coffee – Maxwell House cut with cognac, Kahlúa, Grand Marnier and whipped cream. In hotels it is served with some ceremony – a blue lick of flame on the last pour – but mine had been knocked together where I was staying and tasted no worse for it.

I’D FLOWN INTO Nuuk three days earlier to talk tourism with the people trying to market an Arctic capital without selling its soul. About 20,000 people live here, roughly a third of the country’s population, about 85 per cent of whom are Greenlandic Inuit, or Kalaallit. Nuuk is also Greenland’s biggest port, handling cargo and container ships, fishing boats, coastal ferries and cruise traffic. Everything that arrives or leaves does so by sea or air. There are roads inside settlements but none between them.

The town is Scandinavian in silhouette, Greenlandic in colour: a practical code turned decorative, with red, yellow, blue, green and black once marking who worked where and what the building was for. Narrow streets pitch up and down over the granite and the town’s life gathers at its civic and cultural institutions.

Nuuk has restaurants, bars and “maker-spaces” but the old colonial harbour is where everyone gets their bearings: the Greenland National Museum and Archives, housed in the harbour’s old storage buildings, takes you through 4,500 years of history, from the first Arctic cultures to Norse settlement, colonisation and the modern state. A short walk away, Katuaq functions as the capital’s indoor commons – its undulating screen of golden larch redolent of the Northern Lights – and hosts theatre, concerts, film, exhibitions and a café bar. Next door is Nuuk Center, Greenland’s first shopping mall, where the city runs its errands without pretending it’s Paris

ON GIGS LIKE THIS, the itinerary is an alibi – a cover story. I gather what I need for the brief, do the necessary miles, file the copy, then cash in the real privilege of the job: access. I’m more a people than a place person. The views I care most about are human and journalism gives me a licence to ask those people awkward, intimate questions. I’m interested in what it’s like to live somewhere, not visit. Nothing is wasted, not the small talk, not the silences. What a life it is to sit with strangers and have an excuse to be admitted, however briefly, into their lives.

Survival is resistance

Mistaking volume for authority, repetition for truth and your politeness for consent, any pub bore will tell you that Greenland and Iceland should swap names. Iceland is fairly green, with Reykjavík averaging about 55 days of snow a year. Greenland, meanwhile, is still about 80 per cent ice, a sheet stretching across roughly 1.7 million km². Inuit Greenlanders call their homeland Kalaallit Nunaat, literally the land of the Kalaallit. Which is rather more to the point.

I’ll make no bones about it: for all my weakness in the presence of beauty, Greenland is a rock and a hard place; a country built to test the soft parts of you. Spare, exacting, indifferent. Humans have been there since around 2500 BCE, and for most of that time hunting and fishing meant the difference between a meal and a funeral. Fish, seal and whale at the ice edge. Reindeer inland, musk ox in the north and east. Seabirds when they arrive. Meat and fish, dried, frozen, fermented, stored and shared. That is still how communities on the island hold together.

This food is neither folklore nor cuisine, even when chefs go all “tundra to table” with angelica, seaweed and lumpfish roe spooned like local caviar. Expect halibut, char and shrimp, ptarmigan and snow hare; reindeer and musk ox, served as steaks, stews or burgers; then the delicacies, suaasat, a hearty soup, traditionally made using seal meat, and mattak, whale skin with its layer of blubber. I’ll spare you what sits at the celebratory, uncompromising end of the edible spectrum. It helps to remember that most fresh produce is shipped or flown in, so it costs.

In Greenland’s dozen towns with more than a thousand residents, daily life is a braid of old and new. A hunter in sealskin queues for a cappuccino while teens scroll TikTok in the heat of a window. Kalaallisut – Greenlandic – threads through it all, a polysynthetic language that can carry a whole forecast in a single term. Isersarneq describes a fjord wind off the sea: hard to get home in until you are out of the fjord.

Self-government made Greenlandic the official language, and it is the teaching medium in the early school years. Danish comes next as a foreign language and English follows, yet upper secondary education is still in Danish, with Greenlandic kept as a subject. The result is a lived bilingualism, plus a growing third layer of English, strongest in Nuuk and in visitor-facing work, patchier elsewhere.

The culture is alive. The traditional arts are not museum pieces. In a community centre in Ilulissat I watched a drum dance and the room changed temperature. One performer drove the qilaat, that round frame drum. A voice bestrode the beat, others answered, clapped, took the tale on in chorus. The missionaries denounced it as a heathen curio and moved to suppress it. Relics don’t resist. This resisted.

Greenland’s contemporary music scene is likewise its own, propped up by a handful of venues and studios and two dependable tentpoles: Suialaa Arts Festival in Nuuk and Arctic Sounds in Sisimiut. Its artists, many of them working in Kalaallisut, don’t imitate the world so much as answer it, pulling borrowed forms into a local register until the genre sounds newly grounded.

Nanook deal in wide-skied post-rock, anthem-ready and windswept, not unlike a Greenlandic Sigur Rós. Nive Nielsen & The Deer Children are all ukuleles and bright, oddball folk-pop, light on their feet, sharp at the edges. And Tarrak, rapping about racism and colonialism, follows a line back to hip-hop sextet Nuuk Posse, with their early Nineties, MC-led, human beatbox roots.

TAKKUUK is an audio-visual installation from Bicep, visual artist Zak Norman and filmmaker Charlie Miller, built around the voices of Indigenous artists from across the Arctic. The first track, Taarsitillugu, features Tarrak, who was born in Nanortalik and raps exclusively in Kalaallisut. The title means “letting it go dark”. His name means “shadow”.

The past: not done with it yet

Greenland prefers to be seen through its own eyes and is alert to who is looking and why. The past is an active file: Norse myth, Inuit lives, the paper trail of mission and monopoly. Who gets to decide what happens on the island is a daily discussion.

From Nuuk’s old colonial harbour you can see Hans Egede on his hill beside the red Cathedral of Our Saviour, looking out over the fjord. Egede arrived in 1721, landing at Nuup Kangerlua and establishing Hope Colony on Kangeq, which he named the Island of Hope. Backed by the Bergen Greenland Company, the Lutheran mission was commercial and colonial from the start. In 1728 the settlement was shifted from the island to the mainland and Godthåb was founded, the nucleus of today’s Nuuk.

By the 1770s Denmark stopped improvising and started administering. The Royal Greenland Trading Department was set up in 1774 and, two years later, Copenhagen tightened it into a closed-coast regime: a monopoly on trade and a permit culture that controlled who could enter, who could buy, who could leave. It was justified as protection from economic exploitation In practice it made the state the lock on the door until 1950.

Then the Second World War rearranged the map. Denmark fell to Germany in 1940 and Greenland, suddenly exposed, became a problem other powers might decide to “solve”. On April 9, 1941 the United States and Denmark signed an agreement “relating to the defence of Greenland” that affirmed Danish sovereignty while giving Washington rights to build, use and operate defence facilities. The arrangement was renewed and extended in 1951. The foothold has not gone away.

Today the Americans still operate Pituffik Space Base, renamed from Thule in 2023, in the far northwest. Its solid-state phased-array radar, run by the 12th Space Warning Squadron, underpins missile warning and missile defence: it looks for launches over the northern approaches and pushes the track data into U.S. command networks, with NATO also drawing on the picture, while doubling as a space-surveillance sensor for objects in orbit.

In 1959, about 125 miles northeast of Thule, the U.S. also built Camp Century, an under-ice base that doubled as a feasibility test for Project Iceworm, a plan to disperse nuclear missiles through tunnels in Greenland’s ice so they’d be harder to wipe out in a first strike. It was powered for a period by a portable nuclear reactor, but the missile plan never reached deployment (and Danish consent for it was not secured).

When the base shut in 1967, the U.S. didn’t “clean up” so much as walk away: tunnels, diesel fuel, PCBs, sewage in unlined sumps and low-level radioactive coolant from the portable reactor were left entombed in the ice on the assumption Greenland would freeze them for eternity. In a warming Arctic, that assumption has a use-by date: melt and percolating water could mobilise and carry contaminants downslope towards the ocean, even if the best current modelling says it is very unlikely meltwater will reach the buried debris field before 2100.

Autonomy came late and in stages. In 1953 Greenland’s colonial status ended when it was written into Denmark’s constitution as an integral part of the realm. Home rule followed in 1979, then self-government in 2009, which expanded domestic powers while Denmark kept responsibility for foreign and defence policy. The krone remains the currency, and the Danish block grant still underwrites large parts of the public budget, shadowing every argument for full independence – supported by the political parties Inuit Ataqatigiit and Naleraq – with the same question: replace it with what?

Improper overtures

During the Cold War, the GIUK gap – the choke point between Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom – functioned as NATO’s tripwire: the Atlantic exit Soviet submarines had to run, tracked by seabed listening systems and relentless anti-submarine patrols. It still matters because the Arctic is the shortest corridor for intercontinental missile trajectories between Russia and North America, and because the same seabed now carries the fibre-optic cables that keep transatlantic communications alive.

Then came Donald Trump, talking about Greenland as if it were an estate sale. He revived the idea of U.S. control in openly acquisitive language, dressing it up as security, claiming Russian and Chinese vessels were “all over” Greenlandic waters and saying America would get it “the nice way or the more difficult way”. On January 17 he threatened new tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries, set to begin at 10 per cent in February and rise to 25 per cent in June, “until” a deal was reached for the “complete and total purchase of Greenland”.

Greenland’s political class responded with rare unanimity. The leaders of all five political parties issued a joint statement: they did not want to be Americans and the island’s future was for its people to decide. The streets agreed. “Make America Go Away” caps turned up at the largest protest of its kind in Nuuk’s history, while demonstrations in Denmark carried the same message: “Greenland is not for sale.”

At World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump tried to shove the Greenland blow-up back into its box. He told the room he would not use force, then, after meeting NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, claimed a “framework” had been sketched out and said he would drop the tariffs he had threatened. He then sold it elsewhere as a long-term arrangement delivering missile defence, critical minerals and “total access” for the United States. Since none of that had been agreed, Rutte had to say so.

The smartest rebuttal to Trump’s Greenland gasbagging came from the aforesaid Tarrak, put on camera in Nuuk by Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old MAGA YouTuber, one of those self-styled “citizen journalists” who treats a lens like a warrant card. The rapper didn’t rise to Shirley’s white saviour rhetoric. Calm, unsparing, he called out the age-old American play: Inuit lives matter only when territory and assets are in play; the concern evaporates the moment the map is folded away.

America may forget, but Greenland has seen the movie. In 1953, after the United States pressed for an expanded perimeter at Thule Air Base, the Denmark state relocated Inughuit families from Uummannaq to clear the ground. The base is now Pituffik Space Base.

And Greenland is well read besides. The United States’ treatment of its “own” Indigenous peoples is a moral abomination, even for its time. Quite apart from the estimated 56 million deaths across the Americas between 1492 and 1600 – the result of conquest, forced labour, displacement and epidemic shock acting in concert – the republic that followed turned brutality into an operating cost: removals, wars, reservations and a treaty system built to be broken.

Between 1776 and the end of the 19th century, the U.S. seized land on a continental scale, commonly put at around 1.5 billion acres. Under allotment it then stripped Native nations of more than 90 million acres by 1934.

In the months to come, I’ll be writing about the legacy of all this, by invitation from tribal leaders on reservation territory, so I won’t labour the bloodshed and cultural erasure here¹. It is worth noting, however, that racial profiling is back, that imprecise science of looking and pointing, of holding up Pantone swatches and letting your prejudice show. Four and a half millennia of family history is no insurance against a system that can lift you out of your day on a hunch, zip-tie you into compliance and clear your aggressors of consequence within a couple of days.

In America’s 250th year the public record is under active attack. Not debate, not revision – removal. An executive order now treats anything that “disparages” Americans as suspect, national parks are instructed to strip or soften signage on Native dispossession and climate change, and Philadelphia is in court after a slavery exhibit was torn down at the President’s House. Whitewashing is the policy.

And this is not happening in isolation. It is doctrinal. In Trump’s circle are figures pushing an ethnonationalist creed: the nation as bloodright, identity as exclusion, history as property. Doubt it? On September 30 he signed a determination fixing FY2026 refugee admissions at 7,500, the lowest cap on record, and it has been widely reported that the remaining quota is being prioritised for white South African Afrikaners

Every Trump saga has its comic relief, even when the stakes aren’t funny. This time it was the White House posting “Embrace the penguin” on its official X account: an AI Trump, hand-in-wing with a penguin, trudging towards a Greenland flag, like the cover of a toddler’s book about annexation. Greenland has no wild penguins and the only species north of the equator lives in the Galápagos, so it might have worked as self-parody if Trump had ever shown he can take a joke. Instead it read like a government trying to launder a territorial impulse through a meme and failing primary-school geography.

AS POLAR SEA ICE retreats, the Europe–Asia “short cut” becomes a seasonal proposition: the Northeast Passage along Russia’s northern coast, the Northwest Passage through Canada’s northern archipelago and, further out, a still mostly hypothetical Transpolar Sea Route across the central polar Arctic.

In theory these routes can undercut Suez on distance. In practice they remain niche, constrained by a short seasonal window and the hard realities of ice-class hulls, escorts, insurance and compliance with the IMO’s Polar Code. Even so, Greenland sits on the shoulder of this shifting geography, and the North Atlantic approaches now matter as much for the cable lattice on the seabed as for the vessels above it.

Greenland also sits on a rare concentration of the materials now driving industrial strategy. In its partnership documents, the EU casts Greenland as a partner across the “entire value chain”, from prospecting to end product, including extraction, processing and refining. Wood Mackenzie cites a European Commission estimate that Greenland has the potential to produce 27 of the EU’s 34 critical raw materials, while stressing the obvious caveat: geology is not supply and most projects remain slow, long-lead and largely unproven on the ground.

The prospectors’ wish list is long: graphite, base metals such as copper and zinc, and magmatic systems flagged for nickel–copper–cobalt potential, alongside critical-metal targets including PGMs, niobium, tantalum, molybdenum and titanium. Anorthosite sits in the mix too, used in mineral fillers and construction materials and now licensed for long-term extraction, with pockets of gold and gemstones rounding out the wider picture.

Rare earths are the headline because the West wants supply chains that do not run through China. But Greenland’s story is tangled. After the 2021 change of government, the uranium ban and its 100ppm threshold effectively froze projects where rare earths and uranium occur together. Kvanefjeld/Kuannersuit is the proving ground, endlessly politicised around elections and now mired in legal process, with the key licence claims shunted to the courts and arbitration paused pending what litigation decides.

Despite alternative media’s fondness for an oil narrative, Greenland’s policy has been clear since 2021: no new oil or gas licences. The pause was self-imposed, a decision by Greenland’s own government to step back from hydrocarbons. What remains is a small legacy tail of older permits, mostly onshore, dating from before the ban.

The broader currents are hard to miss. Russia has spent years fortifying its northern presence, reopening bases, extending runways and sending patrols back into the cold lanes. China, styling itself a “near-Arctic state”, has shifted from science to strategy, using research, shipping ambition and investment as routes into influence. NATO, after decades of post-Cold War slackening, is refocusing on the High North, with allies again speaking the language of deterrence and capability gaps.

Denmark is seeing the shift with major investment. A DKK 27.4bn Second Agreement on the Arctic and North Atlantic funds two new Arctic vessels, long-range drones, a maritime patrol aircraft capability, a North Atlantic undersea cable, a new Joint Arctic Command headquarters in Nuuk and an air surveillance radar in East Greenland, building surveillance and sovereign capacity in a region where great-power competition is no longer discreet. What was once treated as a Cold War outpost is now a live junction of alliance politics, monitoring, resources and messaging.

The United States reopened its consulate in Nuuk in June 2020, almost seven decades after the previous post closed, as part of a broader push to reassert itself in the region. Washington paired the move with a $12.1m economic assistance package, pitched in part as a counter to perceived Chinese and Russian interest.

In 2018 China published an Arctic policy paper that framed a “Polar Silk Road” as an infrastructure project as much as a shipping idea, urging its companies to build around the routes. Yet when a Chinese state contractor moved towards Greenlandic airport work, Copenhagen and allies treated it as a security question. China Communications Construction Company was shortlisted, then withdrew from the bidding the following year.

I PUT ALL THIS TO my friend Ivalu Petersen, an environmental scientist born in Maniitsoq (pop. about 2,500) and now living in Reykjavik. It very nearly ruined dinner.

“Those are global talking points. Fuck them. People live here. The international community is flirting with us so hard right now it’s basically foreplay. We can’t move for flowers and chocolates. But I’d love it if they engaged with us as thinking adults, not as Eskimos straight out of a 1950s National Geographic.

“Also, Greenlanders have a pretty distinctive ecological perspective, because we live with the consequences. Climate change isn’t an abstract issue here. Everyone can feel it, even the people who pretend not to notice. I see it every day because it’s literally my job, but you don’t need a lab coat to spot what’s changing.

“Fishing families have been reading land, ice, wildlife, seasons, all of it, for generations. That’s intelligence. They know more than I do. But nobody asks them because they’re not holding a microphone, or a mining licence, or a consultancy contract.

“Kvanefjeld wasn’t just economics. It was locals saying, hang on, what happens to the water, the ecosystems, the stuff we actually eat and live on. Pollution is not an acceptable side-effect when your pantry is the landscape.

“And we’re not just sitting here being acted upon. Greenland’s voice is getting louder in places like the Arctic Council, and appointing a first Arctic ambassador isn’t just symbolic. Sustainable development and indigenous participation are essential. They’re the point, or they should be.

“We will have our day. They can bring more chocolates if it helps them cope.”

The land of make-believe

I fear for Greenland the way I feared for Costa Rica, once Latin America’s great green hope. It sounds almost fanciful now: a democracy that abolished its army after the 1948 civil war and wrote the ban into its 1949 constitution, then redirected the national imagination into classrooms, clinics and rainforest canopies. More than a quarter of its land is officially protected as national parks, biological reserves, wildlife refuges and conservation areas.

That ring-fencing of resources was not for the scenery. For decades, environmental law and public policy treated wildlands as essential capital: water security, climate regulation, sustainable tourism, carbon storage. Costa Rica’s biodiversity is extraordinary for its size. It occupies about 0.03 per cent of Earth’s land surface yet is often credited with around 5 per cent of the planet’s species, something like half a million across rainforests, cloud forests, mangroves and coastal ecosystems.

Now organised crime and narcotrafficking have upended the dream. Costa Rica’s homicide rate has climbed to record highs, with 907 murders in 2023, a terrible jolt for a country long sold as one of the region’s safest. Much of the violence tracks drug trafficking: gangs fighting over routes, ports and domestic markets, turning a transit corridor into a battleground.

The eco-revolution always had a distribution problem, however: conservation gains sat beside deep inequality and local frustrations that the “paradise” project had not lifted everyone. Now civic confidence has been shaken, and the sense of security Costa Ricans once took for granted has frayed.

The good fight continues, however, and I’ll be writing about it properly here before long, with plans to return in the off-season next year.

MONEY IS A HATEFUL THING. It warps the minds of 85 per cent of the people who acquire it, 95 per cent of the people who cling to it and the ones who lose it are rarely much better company. The selfism required to win and hoard it poisons people against their fellow man. They assume other lives run on the same vices they have had to cultivate, that everyone else is driven by the same shabby hunger.

Trickle-down economics was always a bad gag. But the number of people laughing along has dwindled since the punchline became rent, debt and the liquidation of what used to be called ordinary life. The appalling inequities are not accidental. They are the intended outcome, the system’s success story, written in other people’s losses. Anything of true value shrinks under the shadow of the dollar sign.

Given that all I know of the King James Bible is The Song of Solomon and The Book of Revelation, I learned that greed is the root of all evil – radix malorum est cupiditas – from The Pardoner’s Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer, which I first read in Kent where The Canterbury Tales is set – the older I get the more that book reads like a user manual for the age we’re stuck in.

The men now circling Greenland are not explorers, engineers, not even the old extractive barons, who at least grasped that something solid had to be broken to make a profit. These are men of abstraction. Tech and crypto types for whom the world is a system error, reality a design flaw and politics an obstacle to be routed around. They sermonise about innovation and freedom when what they mean is exemption: a life without friction, without accountability, without other people.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir turned Silicon Valley kingmaker – whose political bets are echoing through the corridors of power as I type – looms over this “culture” like a prophet who takes compound interest as evidence of God. He has written that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, and that libertarians should seek an escape from politics rather than try to reform it.

Hence his fascination with private cities, special jurisdictions and governance-lite enclaves, “freedom” zones where the future is meant to happen fast and ask nobody’s consent. His Greenland pitch, as reported, reads like a wank fantasy for the genitally challenged: AI labs, autonomous vehicles, space launches, micro nuclear reactors, all under the polar sun and above democratic oversight.

Just add Trump.

Trump likes to play the strongman, but strongmen need underwriting. His presidency now looks like a venue-hire operation, and the donor roll tells you who’s buying: tech giants, crypto firms, defence contractors. You do not spend hundreds of millions on a ballroom because your foxtrot is coming along nicely. You fund it for access, deregulation, protection and a state that works for you first. Trump does not subscribe to Thiel’s ideology – he barely gets it – but he understands invoices. He is happy to rent out the presidency to whoever keeps the lights on.

The relationship is symbiotic and grotesque. Trump supplies yap, spectacle and the painstaking spoilage of the state. The tech–crypto class supplies cash, policy shopping lists and the delusion of managerial competence. They flatter his ego. He flattens the safeguards. He plays the nationalist by turning “America” into a brand and stamping it over whatever he can, just as he did with his own name. Then he parcels it out to people who think nations are legacy systems.

Greenland does fit the bill: vast, cold, “empty” to the colonial eye and rich in the minerals now coveted by tech and defence. A clique of Silicon Valley financiers has been pressing the Trump administration to see the island as a playground for frontier fantasies, a corporate-run utopia with the state demoted to concierge duties. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery, raised in the same ideological petri dish as his PayPal co-founder Thiel and friendly with Elon Musk, has appeared untroubled by the idea, which is worth more than a footnote.

But they don’t inhabit the real world – Greenland does, and it offers it to you in bracingly beautiful abundance. I may be fearful, but I’m hopeful too, and I do not expect the sequel to Mountainhead – Jesse Armstrong’s almost unwatchably on-the-money tech-bro satire – to be filmed there, movie or documentary, any time soon.

There is a longer, more bruising piece to write about Thiel and his cohort. For now, my good humour is holding, just, and I’m not spending it all at once.

¹ In the 1960s and 1970s Danish authorities oversaw the fitting of IUDs and other contraception to thousands of Inuit women and girls, some as young as 12, often without informed consent. Denmark has apologised and agreed a compensation scheme covering some 4,500 victims. And there is the child-taking. Denmark’s “Little Danes” experiment sent 22 Greenlandic children to Denmark in 1951 to be remade as Danish, then returned many to Danish-speaking institutions, cutting language and kin at the root.

ONE BRIGHT MORNING in Washington, D.C., rush-hour traffic on Embassy Row was brought to a halt by a car bomb. On September 21, 1976, a device hidden beneath a vehicle detonated on Sheridan Circle, killing Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador and critic of General Augusto Pinochet’s regime, and his American colleague, Ronni Moffitt. The attack, one of the most brazen acts of state-sponsored political violence carried out on U.S. soil, was the work of Chile’s secret police, DINA.

The assassination was a calling card of Operation Condor, the clandestine network by which right-wing dictatorships born of Cold War coups and sustained by U.S. political, military or intelligence backing – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and later Brazil – pooled intelligence and operational reach to hunt down each other’s enemies wherever they ran. Proceeding with tacit American approval as part of a hemispheric campaign against perceived subversion, Condor rendered exile meaningless and national borders little more than administrative inconveniences.

From the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954 to the proxy wars of the 1980s in Central America, where Washington financed, trained¹ and equipped forces implicated in mass atrocities, Uncle Sam has loomed over Latin America like a recurring nightmare, casting long shadows across the region’s political and social fabric. And it has warped the Republic’s idea of itself too, leaving a selective innocence behind – the habit of insisting it is only ever responding.

AFTER 1945, AS relations between Washington and Moscow iced over, U.S. policy on Latin America narrowed to a single obsession: keep the left out, whatever the cost. Anti-communist paranoia overrode democratic principle, producing a covert coup playbook focused on replacing reformist governments with pliant anti-left regimes.

Resting on the Monroe Doctrine’s swaggering presumption of authority over the Western Hemisphere, U.S. administrations from Harry S. Truman onward treated even modest economic nationalism as a threat, answering it with intervention, covert action or the backing of authoritarian substitutes. The result was reliably ugly: reformist leaders were destabilised or removed, right-wing strongmen raised up as anti-Soviet sentinels; and repression normalised in the name of containment.

The playbook didn’t stay theoretical for long. In 1954, Guatemala became its proving ground. President Jacobo Árbenz proposed land reforms that were hardly radical by international standards, aimed at putting idle acreage to use and nudging the country towards a modern economy. But they nonetheless threatened the vast holdings of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company – some 550,000 acres in a country of only a few million people – and that got the Cold War hawks circling.

In response, the CIA played a central role in Operation PBSuccess, providing arms, training and financing to forces under Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to depose Árbenz and replace his government with a U.S.-backed military order. The coup ended Guatemala’s brief democratic experiment and ushered in decades of authoritarian rule. Successive governments, sustained by Washington, presided over a protracted civil war in which state forces carried out mass killings and brutal counterinsurgency campaigns, with Indigenous Maya communities bearing the heaviest burden.

In Brazil, João Goulart signed onto John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress with his guard up, reading it, correctly, as leverage dressed as help. Washington responded by trying to corral the president, route aid around him and tighten the tap when he wouldn’t comply. U.S. officials faulted him for refusing to denounce what they saw as “Communist infiltration”.

In March 1964, amid spiralling strikes and mutinies, the generals moved to remove Goulart. Declassified White House tapes and cables show Washington wasn’t waiting to see who won. Operation Brother Sam was on standby – fuel tankers, airlifted arms and an offshore fleet – ready to steady the takeover if it needed a shove. Lyndon B. Johnson ordered his team to “take every step that we can” to keep the coup on its feet.

In the end, Goulart fled and no American troops had to land, but the message was unmistakable: Washington had blessed the new junta. Brazil’s 1964 regime did not arrive as a brief “correction”. It stayed for 21 years, bending the constitution around emergency rule, making rights provisional and normalising the idea that the state could meet dissent with surveillance, detention and force.

Chile under Pinochet: the laboratory of repression

In 1973, Chile became the decade’s exhibit A. Salvador Allende, elected in 1970 on a promise of peaceful socialist reform, was instantly framed in Washington as an intolerable outcome. Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger fretted that a Marxist government in Santiago might prove contagious, a “model” other countries might copy. Within weeks Nixon ordered the CIA to make Chile’s economy “scream”, choking credit and confidence so Allende could not govern, then blaming the breakdown on his own incompetence and excess.

Over the next three years the United States funnelled millions into efforts to unseat Allende, tightening the economic vice while stiffening the spine of his opponents. The CIA worked its way into Chile’s officer corps and backed operations explicitly aimed at creating what US officials called a “coup climate”.

On September 11, 1973, the armed forces under General Augusto Pinochet moved on the presidential palace, La Moneda. British-made Hawker Hunters bombed it. Tanks hammered its lower levels and the infantry pushed forward under fire, exchanging shots with Allende’s bodyguards as they took the building inch by inch. The official account says Allende died by suicide, shooting himself with an AK-47 – a gift from Fidel Castro.

After the coup, Chile became a rebuke to euphemism. “Order” meant terror. The Rettig and Valech commissions record thousands killed or disappeared and tens of thousands jailed and tortured across the general’s 17 years. Human rights investigators mapped a chain of clandestine sites where people were held off the books, raped, beaten and electrocuted, then executed or dumped, all without charge, trial or paperwork.

U.S. officials knew what Pinochet’s security services were doing and played along. In public they spoke the language of concern, sanding down the record, buying time, running interference. Behind closed doors, the tone changed. In 1975, when Chile’s foreign minister Patricio Carvajal bristled at American criticism, Kissinger reassured him: “In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here.”

That sympathy did not end at Chile’s border. It travelled as Operation Condor, terror marketed as security cooperation. Washington was briefed early. By summer 1976, a State Department memo warned Kissinger that the Southern Cone services had created “Operation Condor to find and kill” political opponents, not just on home soil but abroad, including in Europe.

And Condor did not operate on smoke signals. A later State Department cable records Paraguay’s chief of staff telling ambassador Robert White that the member regimes “keep in touch” through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone, using bilateral codes to coordinate intelligence.

Expressions of concern came in bursts and mostly for show. A démarche warning Condor governments off overseas assassinations was drafted in August 1976, then shelved just days before Letelier and Moffitt were killed in Washington.

Chile’s nightmare only began to recede in 1990, when Pinochet stepped aside and military rule gave way to civilian government. Impunity endured, though, protected by an amnesty law Pinochet put in place before leaving office. He remained defiant until 1998, when he was arrested in London on a Spanish warrant alleging crimes against humanity. The case punched a hole in the old escape route: universal jurisdiction, justice that can travel, even for ex-dictators.

Argentina’s Dirty War: sangre y barro on American hands

If Chile’s dictatorship systematised repression, Argentina’s industrialised it – and Washington stayed in the frame. On March 24, 1976, Argentina’s military overthrew President Isabel Perón and installed a junta led by General Jorge Videla, inaugurating the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional – a managerial slogan for what the world would later call “the Dirty War”.

Under the pretext of crushing Marxist “subversion”, the dictatorship turned the state into a disappearance machine. The dead and missing are put at up to 30,000. Some victims were taken onto aircraft and dropped alive into the sea or the Río de la Plata in the so-called death flights. Prgenancy offered no protection. Women who gave birth in custody had their babies seized, renamed and placed with loyalists.

In the Dirty War’s opening phase, Washington was not merely watching. Under Gerald Ford and Kissinger, now secretary of state, the United States kept security assistance flowing and sought to deepen military ties with the new junta, giving a green light just as the repression gathered speed.

Declassified files show tens of millions in arms credits and security assistance pushed through as the junta launched its “anti-terrorist” campaign; one memo logs $49 million approved after the coup. They also catch the tone. In June 1976, meeting Minister Admiral César Guzzetti, Kissinger did not warn, he urged: “We want you to succeed.” In Buenos Aires, as you’d expect, that was taken as permission.

Only under Jimmy Carter did Washington register anything like discomfort: sharper criticism, some assistance curtailed, a brief attempt to make human rights more than wallpaper. The respite did not last. By the early 1980s Reagan was rebuilding ties with anti-communist allies and smoothing over reports of the Argentine junta’s crimes. The dictatorship survived until 1983, when defeat in the Falklands War shattered its authority and drove it from office.

The Dirty War’s body count – tens of thousands, including teenage students, trade unionists, journalists and nuns – blows apart the fiction of a contained “civil conflict”, the phrase Kissinger used to sanitise it. This was state terror, met not with isolation but with diplomatic cover, a Cold War mindset that elevated “stability” above the lives it pulverised.

The Ballad of the Fallen was released in 1983 on ECM Records. Led by Charlie Haden with arrangements by Carla Bley, the album was dedicated to the victims of political violence in Central and South America, particularly Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala. It draws on revolutionary songs, folk melodies and hymns linked to left movements and their repression, moving between grief and fragile resolve.

Guatemala: unmitigated carnage

If any country exemplifies the tragic arc of U.S. intervention in Latin America, it is Guatemala. What began with the CIA-backed coup of 1954 did not merely topple a reformist government, it sabotaged a country’s future. Over the next four decades, the reflex of treating social reform as subversion metastasised into a savage civil war, in which the state – armed, trained and legitimised by Washington – turned its violence on its own people, made terror a method of rule and unmade a nation.

A US cable from 1967 described the methods with a frankness that now reads like a confession, noting “covert Guatemalan security operations” involving kidnapping, torture and summary executions. By the late 1970s and early 1980s – the war’s deadliest run – the army was wiping whole highland villages off the map, treating civilians as enemy infrastructure in scorched-earth campaigns designed to cut insurgents off from food, shelter and fear.

In 1982, under the hardline general Efraín Ríos Montt, the war reached its most murderous pitch. The army’s campaign against the Maya Ixil has been described by courts as genocidal: people were targeted not for what they had done but for who they were, and for what the state claimed they represented. The objective was not simply to fight guerrillas but to empty their human landscape: destroy social bonds, smash cultural life and turn neighbours into informants.

Soldiers did not simply kill. They made a demonstration of it. Men, women and children were slaughtered at close range, homes burned, livestock destroyed, grain stores emptied. Foetuses were cut from wombs. A truth commission later documented what happened – “Young children were smashed against walls or thrown alive into pits” – leaving no room for equivocation. This was a calculated attempt to obliterate a people, their culture treated as expendable in the name of counterinsurgency.

At the same time, the Reagan administration dropped the Carter-era show of distance and went back to full-spectrum cooperation: training, intelligence, weapons. Reagan became Ríos Montt’s main patron. After meeting him in December 1982, he praised the general’s “great personal integrity and commitment” and waved away the human rights outcry as a “bum rap” – not refuting the slaughter so much as waving it through.

Years later the Center for Economic and Policy Research spelled it out for the wilfully obtuse: Guatemala was backed and armed by the United States “with full knowledge” of the crimes carried out with its support. Guatemala’s UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification, set up after the 1996 peace accords, put the toll at more than 200,000 killed or disappeared, attributed 93 per cent of them to state forces and concluded that genocide had been committed against Maya Indigenous groups.

In 2013, a Guatemalan court convicted Ríos Montt of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Ixil Maya – it’s a rare moment when a country puts one of its own on the hook. The victory barely lasted. The verdict was annulled on procedural grounds within days, and Ríos Montt died in 2018 under house arrest. The larger truth holds: in post-dictatorship societies, impunity has a long afterlife and justice arrives late, if at all.

Central America’s slow immolation

Nicaragua in 1979 saw the collapse of the US-backed Somoza dynasty, a kleptocratic family dictatorship that used the state as petty cash. The Sandinistas who took over promised domestic reform and foreign independence, wrapped in Marxist politics and popular-front nationalism – and Washington treated that pairing as a grito de guerra.

Under Reagan, the response was the Contra war, a CIA-backed counter-revolution meant to suffocate the new state at birth and reassert the old order. The U.S. armed, trained and financed the Contras, many recruited from Somoza’s old National Guard. Their method was sabotage with civilians in the blast radius: mined ports, destroyed infrastructure, attacks on health posts and local officials. The human rights abuses that followed were not only a foreseeable outcome but the hallmark of U.S. backing.

In 1986, the International Court of Justice found the United States in breach of international law, citing unlawful force. Reagan’s White House shrugged. Then came Iran–Contra: a pipeline of money and weapons, sustained through illegal arms sales to Iran, used to keep the Contras in the field. It exposed the lengths to which the U.S. would go to sustain the war – not just arguing with the law but routing around it, treating civilian harm as a cost centre and deniability as policy.

Neighbouring El Salvador was pulled into a conflict that became a byword for Cold War savagery. After the October 1979 coup installed a military-civilian junta, the centre gave way fast: repression rose, politics was militarised and in 1980 five guerrilla organisations formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front and took up arms.

In Washington the war was sold as a vital stand against communist expansion. Under Reagan, US military aid to El Salvador jumped from $6 million in 1980 to $82 million by 1982, and over the decade the broader U.S. outlay ran at more than a million dollars a day. The money did not purchase order. It bankrolled a patronage-fed security state that converted dollars and kit into violence that fell mainly on civilians.

About 75,000 people died and the worst of the killing came from the state and the death-squad ecosystem that worked beside it. Priests were targets. Óscar Romero was shot dead while saying Mass. And one atrocity came to stand for the whole war: El Mozote. In December 1981, soldiers from the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion swept through the village in Morazán and exterminated almost everyone they found. Survivors spoke of mass rape, children executed with the muzzle on them and infants bludgeoned to death or tossed into the air and bayoneted.

As ever, Washington’s first instinct was denial, dismissing the massacre as guerrilla propaganda. The evidence did not cooperate. Forensic exhumations, eyewitness testimony and formal investigations established El Mozote beyond doubt, along with the awkward fact that the unit responsible had been trained and advised by U.S. Special Forces just weeks before the killings.

Honduras did not have a civil war in the same sense, but in the 1980s the United States turned it into a forward operating base – a launchpad for Contra raids into Nicaragua and a nerve centre for regional intelligence work. Under that protective canopy, the Honduran army’s Battalion 3-16, trained and advised by the CIA, tortured and disappeared dissidents and refugees with near-total impunity.

In Panama, Manuel Noriega, a CIA-sponsored autocrat, remained in place while he was useful. Once he became a problem, the United States intervened militarily in 1989. Noriega took refuge in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission in Panama City, prompting a siege of sorts – psy-ops loudspeakers and a barrage of noise (including Panama by Van Halen and The Clash’s I Fought the Law) until he surrendered. It was a stripped-down statement of regional reality: loyalty is transactional and sovereignty lasts only as long as Washington allows it.

Threat Level Midnight

Most of the governments Washington destabilised in Latin America did not pose anything like a mortal danger to the United States. They were not in a position to invade, to strike the American homeland or to threaten national survival. But they threatened U.S. primacy in its self-declared sphere, the security state’s fear of precedent and the worry that a leftist project might work, endure and be copied.

In the language of the Cold War, “reform” became “subversion” and “subversion” an emergency. That is how land reform in Guatemala, non-alignment posturing in Brazil or socialism-by-the-ballot in Santiago could be sold as strategic peril, even when the real stakes were investment and ideological influence.

The legal problem is basic: influence is not a casus belli. The UN Charter bars the threat or use of force against any state’s territorial integrity or political independence, with self-defence reserved for the narrow case where an armed attack occurs. The OAS Charter is even blunter, rejecting intervention “for any reason whatever”. The Friendly Relations Declaration restates the same rule in plain terms: sovereignty is not a courtesy and other nations’ governments are not items you can repossess.

When Washington has tried to dress coercion up as law, it has reached for elastic concepts: collective self-defence, protection of nationals or the Monroe Doctrine’s claim that the hemisphere is America’s to police. But unilateral doctrines do not outrank the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice made the point in Nicaragua with judicial frost: no matter how it’s packaged, training and arming proxies, mining harbours, orchestrating “military and paramilitary” operations against another state is unlawful use of force.

In October 1962, Cuba really did pose an existential risk: Soviet nuclear missiles ninety miles from Florida. Yet even then the endgame wasn’t boots on beaches but reciprocal de-escalation. Moscow withdrew the missiles from Cuba, Washington publicly pledged not to invade, and in a separate, secret track the US removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey (and, in practice, Italy) in 1963 – giving Khrushchev something concrete to point to at home.

So, Venezuela – what gives?

Trump did not wake up on January 3, 2026 and decide, on a fancy, to snatch a head of state. He had spent months fashioning a noose in public. First came the bounty. Washington doubled the reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million in early August 2025. That was swiftly followed by a military build-up in the Caribbean, under a counternarcotics ensign, with warships and amphibious forces moved into the region and air assets deployed as the posturing increased.

From early September, U.S. forces began striking small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that Washington labelled drug-running vessels. By the end of December, reporting put the toll at at least 115 dead across 35 strikes and found the victims were the kind of people smuggling networks recruit because they are broke and disposable. Families and lawyers described the attacks as extrajudicial killings and UN experts argued that drug trafficking, by itself, does not constitute a lawful basis for lethal force on the high seas.

When allegations surfaced that shipwrecked survivors – hors de combat even under the administration’s own “armed conflict” framing – had been fired on, War Secretary Pete Hegseth reached for the language of battlefield inevitability, citing the “fog of war” and insisting he “didn’t see” anyone in the water. The defence drew derision because it amounted to this: if you don’t look, you can’t be blamed. At the same time the Pentagon refused to release the full, unedited footage, calling it top secret and confining scrutiny to tightly managed briefings for lawmakers

Alongside the kinetic campaign came measures designed to squeeze Venezuela by increments. On October 15 Trump confirmed he had authorised the CIA to run covert operations inside the country, an escalation first reported as a classified directive. On November 29 he went further, posting that the airspace “above and surrounding Venezuela” should be considered “closed in its entirety”, a unilateral decree that even U.S. officials struggled to translate into an actual enforcement plan.

In December, pressure shifted to Venezuela’s lifelines. Reuters reported the U.S. seizure of a sanctioned oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast. Days later Trump announced a “total and complete” blockade of such tankers entering and leaving the country. PBS added a late December drone strike, carried out by the CIA, on a docking area said to be used by drug cartels.

Then Trump threw down. In the pre-dawn hours of January 3, a wave of U.S. strikes hit targets in and around Caracas, including Venezuelan air-defence systems, while parts of the city lost electricity. Photographs from La Carlota air base showed a wrecked anti-aircraft unit and charred vehicles from an air-defence formation. The operation was huge in the air but tight on the ground: more than 150 aircraft launched from 20 bases, followed by low-flying helicopters carrying special forces into the capital. Civilian damage was not hypothetical. Homes and apartment blocks were hit, and a TV and telephone tower brought down on nearby housing.

Special forces moved in on a Maduro safe location, grabbed him and his wife, Cilia Flores, and hustled them out under heavy air cover. They were taken offshore to a U.S. Navy ship before being flown to New York, where they were produced in federal court on drug and weapons charges and Maduro described himself as “kidnapped”.

In Caracas, Delcy Rodríguez stepped in as interim president, charged with holding the reeling state together. Trump said the US would “run” Venezuela and, when asked who was in charge, he replied in the first person, warning that if the remaining authorities “don’t behave” there would be “a second strike”.

The backlash was swift, even at home. On January 8 the Senate advanced a bipartisan War Powers resolution to block Trump from taking further military action in Venezuela without Congress, a rare moment of lawmakers reaching for the Constitution while the White House insisted this was merely “law enforcement” that happened to involve airstrikes and the capture of a foreign head of state.

By January 9, Trump said he had called off a “second wave” of attacks, claiming Venezuelan “cooperation” and pointing to promised prisoner releases as proof the pressure was working. In the same breath he dangled a sit-down with María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

Nobel stature has yet to buy Machado a seat at the table, let alone the wheel. Trump has said Venezuela is “not yet ready” for elections, effectively relegating Machado to the role of laureate on tour while the post-Maduro “transition” is supervised by the same apparatus the U.S. calls illegitimate.

VENEZUELA HAS BEEN an oil nation for a hundred years. After the Barroso No. 2 blowout at Cabimas in 1922, its modern identity was rewritten in crude: concessionaires rushed in, Lake Maracaibo became an industrial frontier and by 1928 the country was the world’s leading oil exporter, a coffee-and-cacao republic abruptly recast as a rentier state with pipelines.

From the 1940s the Venezuelan state tightened its grip on oil income. The 1943 Hydrocarbons Law, with the tax changes that came with it, pushed the government take towards a 50 per cent share and made crude the treasury’s load-bearing backbone, not merely a lucrative export.

The 1970s price shocks delivered Venezuela’s petro-delirium. A founding OPEC member since 1960, it took the next step in 1976, nationalising the industry and creating PDVSA. For a while PDVSA was competent, even formidable, funding modernisation and building technical muscle. But it also encouraged a simple dodge: oil money instead of taxes, and taxes are what make a state answerable to its citizens.

By the 1990s, Caracas was trying to square a hard circle: keep sovereignty, attract capital. The Apertura Petrolera reopened parts of the oil sector, bringing in foreign firms through service-style operating agreements and Orinoco “strategic associations” for heavy crude that Venezuela could not develop alone.

The price boom of the 2000s then gave President Hugo Chávez room to tear up the compromise. He reasserted state control, forced contract rewrites and turned PDVSA from operator into instrument, using oil revenue to bankroll a Bolivarian project. Chávez was not a cartoon villain so much as a true believer in geology as destiny, charisma as authority and oil as a shortcut to a new social contract.

For a while the numbers behaved. Poverty fell in the boom years and ECLAC’s 2013 Social Panorama put Venezuela among the region’s fastest improvers in 2012. But the gains were built on sand. By the time Maduro took over after Chávez’s death in 2013, the state had been wired to spend first and maintain later. PDVSA had been turned into an off-budget cash machine, routing tens of billions into social programmes and discretionary funds while investment and maintenance were treated as optional extras.

From mid-2014, oil prices slid hard. Brent went from $111.80 in June 2014 to $47.76 in January 2015, then $30.70 in January 2016. Venezuela had no buffer, so everything cracked at once. Output fell to 742,000 bpd in 2023 – a 70 per cent cumulative decline from 2013. Hyperinflation shredded wages. What had been one of Latin America’s richest states turned into a cautionary spectacle: bankruptcy in real time.

As the economy went into freefall, Venezuelan politics clenched. Maduro pushed elected opponents aside and made the courts and electoral bodies answer to him. In July 2019 the UN human rights office reported a strategy “aimed at neutralising, repressing and criminalising political opponents and people critical of the Government”, citing arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment, sexual violence in detention and excessive force used against protesters.

In the south, the Arco Minero – the Orinoco Mining Arc, where gold is the main prize – turned into a lawless extraction zone. Criminal sindicatos ran mines like fiefdoms, charging “taxes” at every gate and checkpoint, paying off military commanders and enforcing their rule with beatings, amputations and killings. The labour was brutal: 12-hour shifts in hazardous pits, with children as young as nine put to work.

By late 2024, roughly 7.9 million Venezuelans were outside the country, a displacement on the scale of a major war. Colombia, Brazil and Peru took the largest share, and the pressure hit first at street level – education, health, housing and jobs.

COLD WAR VENEZUELA was oil first. A 1953 US policy statement put it bluntly: petroleum was “of outstanding importance” in Venezuelan–US relations and the priority was to keep access secure and the market dependable. Venezuela’s politics had already swung hard. The democratic opening that elected the novelist-president Rómulo Gallegos ended with his removal in the 1948 coup and the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship followed. But when democracy returned in 1958, Washington embraced Rómulo Betancourt’s reformist, non-communist government.

What changed under Chávez is that friction became structural and public: ideology, Cuba, alignments, democratic backsliding. April 2002 brought a botched coup attempt that briefly installed the business leader Pedro Carmona, whose opening – and fatal – move was the Carmona Decree, dissolving the National Assembly and Supreme Court. He lasted about two days. By 2006 the U.S. had formally branded Venezuela “not fully cooperating” on counterterrorism, triggering a ban on U.S. arms sales and transfers, and by 2008 Chávez was expelling the U.S. ambassador.

By Maduro’s first year, Washington and Caracas were past “strained” and into open hostility. The February–July 2014 protests, fuelled by insecurity and shortages, were met with state violence and mass arrests, with rights groups reporting arbitrary detention and abuse in custody. Congress followed with a sanctions law in December 2014. In March 2015 Obama declared a national emergency, launching asset freezes and travel bans on officials tied to abuses

In August 2017, Trump moved first on finance, shutting down new debt channels for Venezuela and PDVSA in U.S. markets. After the 2018 election was dismissed abroad, the U.S. recognised Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president in January 2019, blacklisted PDVSA within days and by August 2019 had placed a blanket block on the Government of Venezuela itself.

In 2020 the Department of Justice unsealed charges that repeatedly described the Cartel de Los Soles as a drug-trafficking organisation and alleged that Maduro “helped manage and, ultimately, lead” it. By the time he was arraigned in Manhattan, the newer superseding indictment had softened the wording: “Cartel de Los Soles” became a label for a patronage system “referred to as” the cartel, with the core allegation recast as state-enabled trafficking by a corrupt political-military elite.

Venezuela’s place in the narcotics trade has always been about transit, not production: a corridor through which Colombian cocaine travels by air and sea towards the Caribbean, the U.S. and Europe, with West Africa now part of the extended route. Yet the drug Trump has cast as America’s defining scourge is fentanyl – the synthetic opioid he has elevated to a national security crisis. Its manufacture is concentrated in Mexico, fed by precursor chemicals shipped mainly from China, with India fast becoming a secondary supplier.

If this were only about drugs you might expect Washington to come for Gustavo Petro in Colombia or Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico. Trump has certainly rattled his saber at both Bogotá and Mexico City, sinking “fishing vessels” – according to Petro – and suggesting the United States should be able to act on Mexican soil. Yet it is Maduro who has been hauled to the dock, facing New York narcotics charges.

So it’s about oil, then, people say, reaching for a familiar script, Iraq with different scenery. Oil is part of it, no doubt. Venezuela still sits on the world’s largest proved reserves, about 303 billion barrels of it, by OPEC’s own numbers.

But much of that oil lies in the Orinoco Belt as heavy and extra-heavy crude. It is viscous, high-cost stuff that often needs diluent blending or upgrading before it can be moved and sold. Venezuela’s problem is that turning it into exportable barrels demands capital and the sort of expertise that PDVSA haemorrhaged and sanctions made harder to import.

Trump’s plan is to make Venezuela pay for itself. Oil would be sold, the proceeds warehoused in U.S.-controlled accounts and spent at Washington’s discretion, sparing the American taxpayer. He has also moved to protect that pot from creditors, signing an executive order that blocks courts from attaching oil revenues while they sit in Treasury accounts.

With the cashflow “protected”, Trump is pushing a private-sector rebuild, claiming he can unlock $100 billion in investment with Export-Import Bank guarantees. The Treasury has added a multilateral sweetener, floating the release of about $5 billion in SDRs – reserve assets Caracas can’t currently access – that Venezuela could convert into hard cash, alongside renewed IMF and World Bank engagement.

It’s half workable mechanism, half cloud-cuckoo pitch. The administration can sell the crude and seize the cash, but the sums run to only a few billion dollars in gross revenue, and creditors are circling regardless of the executive order. At the same time, Venezuela is staring down a circa $150 billion debt restructuring that scares off serious investors.

ExxonMobil’s CEO, Darren Woods, has called the country “uninvestable” without security guarantees and sweeping legal reform, but Trump has turned on such prudence, saying he may keep Exxon out of the deal and dismissing the company’s stance as “playing too cute”.

Workable or not, the plan is conditional – and the conditions aren’t a gentle nudge for Caracas to diversify its friendships. In Monroe mode, Washington sees Venezuela as the backyard, and it’s done watching its rivals camp out there. The instruction is simple: evict China, Russia, Iran and Cuba, then cut an exclusive oil partnership with the U.S. and tilt heavy‑crude sales toward America. The catch is that those ties aren’t theoretical – they’re in the ground.

Beijing’s engagement with Venezuela has been both financial and strategic. In the 2000s and 2010s China became Caracas’s lender of last resort, extending large credit lines structured as oil-for-loan, repaid in crude. The lending totals are commonly estimated at just over $100 billion in commitments since 2000, while the amount still outstanding is usually put in the $10–$12 billion range.

But China’s role goes beyond loans. State energy giants such as Sinopec and CNPC hold the largest foreign “entitlement” claims to Venezuelan oil reserves, and for years China was the key destination for shipments, directly or via rerouted flows. That mix of creditor, buyer and partner leaves Beijing with a deep, sunk stake in Venezuela’s oil machine, even as Washington tries to prise those flows away.

China’s Venezuela interest isn’t just barrels – it’s the periodic table. The power does not sit at the pit mouth, it sits at the processing plant. The International Energy Agency’s point issimple: China is the leading refiner for 19 of the 20 strategic minerals it tracks, with an average share around 70 per cent, which is how you build a supply-chain choke point without ever saying the word “blockade”.

Venezuela fits this not as a neatly measured treasure chest but as a risky lever. The Orinoco Mining Arc is violent and opaque, shot through with illicit gold and coltan and forms of governance that look more like rackets than regulation. From Washington’s perspective, the nightmare is the double bind: Chinese footholds near the source in the hemisphere, paired with Chinese dominance of the refinery and magnet bottlenecks that turn raw rock into a geopolitical advantage.

Russia’s stake in Venezuela is martial before it is commercial. Under Chávez, Moscow built an arms relationship that gave Caracas a modernised force and an air-defence umbrella: a deal for 24 Su-30s worth roughly $1.6 billion, followed by purchases of high-end systems including the S-300VM, publicly displayed in 2013, alongside other Russian kit.

In energy, Venezuela approved a 15-year extension with a Roszarubezhneft unit to operate the Boquerón and Perijá fields through 2041, targeting about 91 million barrels (around 16,600 bpd) with estimated investment of $616 million and the Russian holding says it intends to stick to its commitments.

And in January 2026 the rivalry turned demonstrative: the United States seized a Russia-flagged oil tanker linked to Venezuelan exports after a two-week pursuit, an operation Reuters says was shadowed by a Russian submarine – a symbolic flashpoint in the wider contest over Venezuelan resources and influence.

Iran’s engagement with Venezuela is rooted in hard expediency, not ideology. With both Caracas and Tehran under U.S. sanctions, Tehran has supplied the light condensate Venezuela desperately needs to dilute its extra-heavy crude so it can actually be exported – a swap mechanism first reported by Reuters that illustrates how the two regimes sidestep sanctions pressures.

What worries Washington is that the relationship doesn’t stop at the refinery gate. U.S. Treasury sanctions in December 2025 accuse a Venezuela-based firm, EANSA, of supporting the assembly and upkeep of Iranian Mohajer drones in Venezuela and negotiating combat-drone sales. That’s the pattern: shared isolation turns into shared workarounds, then into shared military capability.

Cuba is the cleanest proof that this plan uses energy as punishment. Trump has promised there will be “no more” Venezuelan oil or money to Havana. Reuters reports Venezuela sent Cuba about 27,000 bpd between January and November last year, roughly half of Cuba’s deficit. This coercion with a fuel gauge, designed to turn Cuba’s domestic breakdown into part of Washington’s pressure system.

Once you stack China’s loans and offtake, Russia’s arms and long-tail oil structures, Iran’s sanctions hacks and Cuba’s dependency – it becomes obvious that the “geopolitics” isn’t incidental. It’s the whole point. Venezuela is being handled like a disputed asset on America’s doorstep, a country turned into a storage locker for rival power, and Washington has decided it wants the master key. The drugs talk helps with TV, the oil talk helps with the spreadsheet, but the real argument is sovereignty in the hemisphere: who is allowed to be present, and who is told to leave.

Hoots Don

I had to check he was dead, but Andy Stewart – the man behind Donald, Where’s Your Troosers? – would be doing a full Highland reel in his coffin. It began as a novelty song about a Donald caught short and brazening it out. Now it’s the governing philosophy of his namesake.

Trump has the Scottish pedigree for the punchline too. It’s the old story of the emperor’s new clothes, tartan edition. The man hasn’t got a stitch on – but he’s certain it’s clan-approved.

The branding never stops.

The Monroe Doctrine, James Monroe’s 1823 warning to Europe to keep its hands off the Western Hemisphere, has been rebadged as a personal franchise, the “Don-roe Doctrine”. In the administration’s own National Security Strategy, the intent is laid out: restore American “preeminence” in the region, recruit friendly governments against “narco-terrorists” and cartels and deny “non-Hemispheric competitors” the ability to own or control “strategically vital assets” in “our Hemisphere”.

To think, six months ago I imagined Trump, having militarised America against itself, had the appetite for only one battlefield and that was domestic. Such has been his woeful handling of matters at home, however, he has expanded the fight rather than resolve it. When you can’t fix the house, you start kicking the fence.

It reads – and is starting to look – like open season on anything within shouting distance of American geography. The brazenness has even Washington blinking: when the grown-ups begin issuing statements like they’re trying not to wake the toddler, you know things have gone odd.

Take Greenland. Or, rather, don’t. Trump says the U.S. must “own” the island to keep Russia and China out. The White House adds that the military is “always an option”. Nordic diplomats, in the role of exhausted relatives, point out that the hostile fleet exists mainly in what might be charitably called Trump’s “mind”. It’s a Christmas dinner monologue from your morbidly senile grandfather, except the Pentagon is in the room and the president is selling tickets.

Observers note that initial “shock and awe” can curdle into a quagmire. Venezuela’s turmoil will not end just because Maduro is gone. The AI-generated “celebrations” of grateful Venezuelans doing the rounds do not reflect reality – the algorithm is throwing confetti and putting up bunting; Caracas is putting up checkpoints.

The harder question is the only one that matters: who governs now? A country shattered economically and socially cannot be fixed by diktat from Washington, least of all at gunpoint. For the moment Trump is exultant in a short-term win. He got his man, in cinematic fashion, and demonstrated a willingness to do what previous U.S. presidents baulked at. What he has not demonstrated is a plan for the morning after.

But the long-term costs and risks are enormous. The precedent alone – abducting a head of state and blowing up targets in a foreign capital – shreds what remains of hemispheric norms around sovereignty. It will likely drive US adversaries, and some nervous partners, closer together in opposition.

On the ground, Washington now owns a broken country and Trump talks like a proprietor. The register is colonial, which is the point: it strips away the last varnish of ideals. He holds up Nayib Bukele as an “example” for the region, even as human rights monitors document El Salvador’s state of exception as a conveyor belt for mass arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment and systemic due-process abuse.

The coming chapter will test whether this display of power can build anything worth living in, or whether it simply adds new rubble to old ruin. As you read at the beginning of this Substack, Latin America has seen this film before, countless times, and the region’s memory is not easily bribed into amnesia.

¹ If anything serves as an illustration of Washington’s intent in Latin America during the Cold War, it is the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, at Fort Benning, Georgia: a Defence Department institution that trained more than 60,000 regional soldiers, including future dictators Ríos Montt and Leopoldo Galtieri. When the Pentagon released the School’s training manuals in September 1996, it became clear that what the United States had been exporting was a counterinsurgency creed that normalised coercion and treated civilian life as a problem to be managed rather than a boundary to be respected.

² It has since emerged that the Pentagon used an aircraft painted to resemble a civilian plane in its first strike on a boat the Trump administration said was smuggling drugs. The aircraft reportedly carried no visible weapons, with its munitions housed inside the fuselage rather than hung under the wings. If we accept the administration’s claim that this campaign constitutes an armed conflict with suspected drug runners, the law of armed conflict draws a line: you may not feign civilian status in order to lull an adversary into lowering its guard, then kill. That prohibited trick is called perfidy – and, if proved, it is a war crime.

MILES SAYS SHE was ambushed on a street in Redmond, a Seattle suburb, by four masked men in ICE vests who leapt out of unmarked SUVs and demanded to see her papers. Miles produced her tribal ID – issued by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon – a federally recognised form of identification she has used to cross borders.

The agents allegedly scoffed, said it looked “fake”, refused to verify it and tried to snatch her phone when she attempted to call her tribe’s enrolment office. Only when a fifth man whistled did the group retreat – leaving her with nothing; no names, no badge numbers, no explanations.

Miles was left shaken and furious – and she’s not alone. Her son and uncle, both U.S. citizens, have been detained in similar fashion. Tribal IDs are lawful proof of citizenship; ICE officers are required to accept them. Yet Native people keep getting treated as “foreigners” in their own land. As Gabriel Galanda, a Seattle-based Indigenous rights attorney, put it: “What we’re talking about here is racial profiling. People are getting pulled over or detained on the street because of the dark colour of their skin”.

Turning impunity into infrastructure

For their part, federal authorities dispute some of Miles’s allegations. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin has acknowledged that Miles was briefly stopped on November 3 by ICE agents – but insists that “any claim that ICE questioned her tribal ID” is false.

Calling observers “sceptical” of that denial is newsroom euphemism. Given Miles’s testimony – and its eerie resemblance to countless other accounts – scepticism is the least of it. Most readers will assume, quite rationally, that the agency is evading, obfuscating or simply lying.

ICE is not a “troubled” or “badly supervised” arm of DHS. It is an institution that cannot be trusted to obey the law. Federal judges keep saying so in plain English; so do rights groups. The only people pretending otherwise are the ones running it.

Since Trump’s return in January, the agency has behaved like a force that knows the law is optional. It breaks rules, gets hauled into court, shrugs and carries on until the next injunction. It is disorder in uniform.

The evidence piles up like bodycam footage.

In Chicago, lawyers have gone back to federal court on behalf of 26 people swept up in home, street and workplace raids, arguing that ICE is once again barging in without warrants, in direct breach of a 2022 consent decree that was supposed to stop exactly that – and of the Fourth Amendment itself.

In Colorado, a federal judge has found that ICE officers “routinely” made unlawful warrantless arrests and issued an injunction barring the practice statewide, after evidence that agents were ignoring statutory limits and treating arrest quotas and profiling as a substitute for probable cause.

Around Los Angeles, lawsuits describe workers – including U.S. citizens – grabbed off streets and outside job sites, held without food, water or access to lawyers and subjected to what plaintiffs bluntly call an “unconstitutional siege” on their neighbourhoods.

Courts are not nitpicking paperwork errors here. They are saying, again and again, that ICE is arresting people in ways that are flatly unlawful. And the raids continue until a judge physically wedges a ruling between the agency and the next door it plans to kick in.

Detention is the same story. In San Francisco, a federal judge had to order ICE to overhaul conditions in its holding cells at 630 Sansome Street – windowless concrete rooms kept under bright fluorescent lights, often freezing, filthy, without beds or blankets – calling the conditions “likely punitive” and unconstitutional even for convicted criminals. These are civil detainees who, on paper, are not serving a sentence at all.

Nationally, what were supposed to be short‑term “hold rooms” have become secretive long‑term lock‑ups. In mid‑2025 ICE scrapped its 12‑hour limit and authorised holding people for up to 72 hours. In practice, investigations have uncovered people kept for weeks in these concrete boxes, sleeping on the floor next to a toilet, with no showers, no beds and scant access to lawyers. Courts keep finding violations; ICE keeps seeing how far past the line it can push before the next injunction lands.

Mandatory detention tells the same tale in bolder type. Trump’s summer 2025 policy of jailing virtually everyone in deportation proceedings – no bond, no individualised assessment – has been ruled illegal or unconstitutional by well over 100 federal judges, according to a Politico analysis. DHS is still trying to run the scheme while it appeals. That is not a misunderstanding of the law. It is defiance of it.

The contagion has been able to spread because ICE has learned how to subcontract its worst impulses. Roughly nine in ten people in its custody now sleep in beds owned or run by private prison giants – CoreCivic, GEO Group, LaSalle, MTC – with extensive abuse records.

CoreCivic has told investors that its ICE business is running nearly 55 per cent higher than the same quarter a year earlier, with overall revenue up 18 per cent since Trump’s second term began. GEO, LaSalle and MTC are all reporting bumper immigration profits off the back of new no‑bid detention contracts.

The structure is deliberately opaque: ICE contracts with a county or a U.S. Marshals district; the county subcontracts to a private operator; that operator subcontracts medical care to another private firm. Everyone takes a cut. Responsibility dissolves. Abuse becomes a cost of doing business rather than a scandal that ends it.

Deportation flights, too, have become a business line. Charter companies now bid for ICE contracts the way others bid for holiday routes. Flight attendants hired in Harlingen, Texas, describe doing deportation runs five days a week to Central and South America, shuttling shackled passengers on and off planes whose profitability depends on every seat being filled. In that logic, due process isn’t a safeguard – it’s an inefficiency.

And frontline enforcement is being franchised out through the 287(g) programme. ICE now boasts more than 1,000 agreements with sheriffs and police chiefs across 40 states, deputising local officers with minimal immigration training to act as federal agents. Under a new reimbursement scheme, Washington covers their salaries and pays quarterly bonuses based on how many “removable” immigrants they help ICE locate – a cash incentive structure that all but invites racial profiling.

When law enforcement is paid by the head, lawlessness is the business model.

ICE is no longer just one rogue agency; it is the hub of an expanding deportation machine that pulls in the Pentagon’s aircraft, the Marshals’ and Bureau of Prisons’ cells, county jails, private prison REITs and city councils hungry for federal dollars.

Detention numbers climb past what Congress originally funded, patched over with “emergency” money. Federal appeals courts gut state attempts to ban private immigration jails, ruling that states may not interfere with federal contracts even when their voters try. Budgets swell. Oversight shrivels. Whole towns become economically dependent on cages.

This is how the shadow state becomes self-sustaining: local money, federal power, private profit, zero sunlight.

On with the show

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, a Christmas gift: Seoul Mates (season three, episode ten) turns questions of identity and tradition into a trademark meditation on what makes a family and the rituals that bring a community together through winter darkness

The first thing you see is a moose striding down the main street of Cicely, Alaska, placid and faintly comic, such is the nature of the beast (unless he’s in rut). The town looks gently scuffed: brick and clapboard storefronts, low-slung facades and a bar, The Brick, to which every storyline returns, for company, clarity or closure.

Then the theme music fires up: David Schwartz’s mix of chromatic harmonica, accordion, fretless bass and syncopated percussion, a back-porch zydeco-jazz jam that practically cartwheels into every episode.

The premise is deceptively simple. Dr Joel Fleischman (Rob Morrow), a newly minted Columbia graduate from New York, arrives in the remote town of Cicely, Alaska, obliged to repay the state for financing his education. But he soon discovers that he is effectively indentured to Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin), a blowhard ex-astronaut with proprietary feelings about the town’s future. That Cicely merely tolerates, rather than endorses its would-be benefactor is a small consolation.

Cicely, “the jewel of the Alaskan Riviera”, never existed, of course. It was rumoured to have been inspired by Talkeetna, Alaska – a tiny town with its own odd traditions, including a Moose Dropping Festival in which alcine turds were dropped from a helicopter onto a target for charity – though the show’s creators have always kept shtum on the matter. What we do know is that Cicely’s exterior charms were played by Roslyn, Washington, which hosts an informal “Moosefest” in late July for fans of the series to spend a few days together.

Northern Exposure ran on CBS for six seasons, from 1990 to 1995, losing its footing only late on after its lead actor left. It began as a summer fill-in but graduated to prime time. On paper, it must have looked like a hungover pitch arriving at the network in clown shoes and a tux, yet Joshua Brand and John Falsey, alumni of St Elsewhere and the civil rights drama I’ll Fly Away, moulded it into one of TV’s most tender portraits of America: an emotionally literate dramedy; part Jungian casebook, part folk atlas.

It may be television, meaning it wasn’t picked out on a dulcimer or whittled from bog oak, but the show belongs in the canon of American vernacular art. Its DNA can be traced back to what the culture critic Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America”: the half-mythic republic you can hear in Dylan’s Basement Tapes, all boxcars and murder ballads, medicine shows and crossroads hamlets where the past, with nowhere else to go, stays put, picnicking out of its bindle.

But it isn’t a sepia re-enactment. Its sensibility is unmistakably modern: inclusive, progressive and unusually alert, for its time, to the full spectrum of human life. Cicely is an anthology town, in the old, truest sense of the word, edited with the same democratic ear you hear in the Lomaxes’ field recordings. No voice is anointed “official” and everyone – saint, crank, misfit, tourist, Native, newcomer – gets a verse.

In season three, episode 23, the town’s founding myth is laid out: Cicely was transformed from a frontier outpost into a “Paris of the North” – a bohemian artists’ colony – by Cicely and Roslyn, a lesbian couple who arrived in the early 20th century, having flown the conservatism of Montana.

The show also staged one of the earliest same-sex weddings on U.S. television – in 1994, long before Obergefell v. Hodges mandated legal recognition nationwide – and granted the couple the same narrative weight and licence it afforded its straight characters.

Elaine Miles’s casting was serendipitous – she went along to an audition with her mother and was spotted waiting in the lobby – yet her performance as Marilyn Whirlwind became one of Northern Exposure’s load-bearing presences. In her silences, side-eyes and internal smirks, the show finds its centre of gravity.

As Fleischman’s Alaska Native (Tlingit) receptionist, she was the first Native American woman to be a regular cast member on a network television series, serving as his shtiler froy – a buffer against his constant kvetching and metropolitan fret.

Miles is only the most visible part of a broader Native ensemble that informs the show’s worldview. Although Marilyn is sometimes written through a time-tarnished lens of inscrutable authority – Reservation Dogs was three decades away – Northern Exposure gives her, along with figures such as the shaman Leonard Quinhagak (Graham Greene) and the spirit guide One-Who-Waits (Floyd Westerman), roles that challenge assumptions about knowledge and who gets to hold it.

The same sensibility underpins the show’s engagement with myth, psychology and magical realism. Northern Exposure pairs character-driven drama with dream logic, and when it brushes against the surreal or fantastical it never does so at the expense of emotional coherence.

Much of this feels as Indigenous as it does European or Western: visions have authority, spirits appear without frantic rationalisation and the land is an active presence. Enlightenment romanticism in a parka, then, but one that embraces faith in all its forms, a world in which Catholic chasubles, Jewish tallitot, Ravenstail robes and the vestments of secular certainty flutter companionably on its washing lines.

Nothing less than a fall from grace

The expansion of ICE has turned much of the country into a low-grade checkpoint regime: workplaces raided, homes surveilled, communities destabilised by the constant threat of removal. Racial profiling is a design feature of that system, a way of sorting bodies at speed and at scale.

It flattens people into categories, suspicions and risk assessments, rewarding fear over familiarity, force over curiosity. In that sense, it is the precise inverse of Northern Exposure, a show that imagined America not as a machine for exclusion but as a loose, eccentric commons where difference is ordinary, even welcome, and where community is something you build rather than police.

Watching it now, the contrast lands viscerally. ICE turns strangers into suspects; Northern Exposure converts them into neighbours. One is the sharp end of American power, the other the soft, stubborn hope of its imagination – a version of the nation that trusts people to show up as they are, and trusts communities to make room for them.

Happy Christmas, Chag Sameach, Sigóowu Kíswas, Mali Kishmish…

I was sitting in a downtown bar in Mobile, Alabama, having walked the cramp out of my legs after a ten-hour Greyhound ride, when I first encountered institutional racism in the raw.

A door opened, and a sketch artist stepped inside, carrying himself carefully, pausing at the threshold. He raised a hand in greeting, a soft leather satchel stuffed with pads and small canvases hanging low off his shoulder. He smiled, angling slightly to his left, the better to show off the tools of his trade. The bartender, rag on shoulder, deep grooves in his face, shook his head and gave the airiest of shooing gestures. And with that, the artist vanished, like he’d barely been a ghost.

A man at a corner table – broad, slouched and already tumbling into a slow, belligerent drunkenness – snorted. “Guess some folks still don’t get the hint.” A smear of satisfaction crossed the faces of his fellow patrons. The bartender looked at me, his smirk defiant.

It was only then that my road-bleary eyes took in the room. A Confederate battle flag was pinned to the ceiling, rippling in the aircon. On the walls, some in gilt frames, were campaign posters for George Wallace, Jesse Helms and Lester Maddox – all famously fierce opponents of the civil rights movement in America. Running a light sweat, the man next to me followed my gaze, his expression bordering on the devotional.

My Budweiser turned to mealworms in my mouth. I made to leave, but new arrivals hemmed me in – Daughters of the Revolution, fresh from a debutante ball, on the hunt for some after-party action. They moved as one, in cream puff and taffeta, seething over some offhand remark a Black man had made outside, slinging racial slurs about like they were Mardi Gras beads from a Krewe of Comus float. Entitlement hung in the air like cheap perfume in a crowded lift. “How dare he?” [To adequately capture their indignation, this font is too neat, each word – letter, even – requires italicising, contorting, warping.]

We’ve only just begun

This was the early Nineties, nearly three decades after the Jim Crow laws – which had enforced segregation in the South since Reconstruction – were struck down by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s. Yet in a single, terrible instant, I saw that nothing had really changed, not fundamentally; least not for Black lives in Mobile. That realisation marked the beginning of my 30 years of study, allyship and writing about race in the United States.

Reconstruction – the effort between the Civil War’s end and 1877 to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social and economic legacy – was a failure. In truth, it was rigged to fail, not least by Andrew Johnson, President Lincoln’s successor. An implacable racist, Johnson spread the fiction that Reconstruction had been hijacked by radicals bent on Black rule and the persecution of ex-Confederates. That lie emboldened white supremacist groups – the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, the Red Shirts in Mississippi and the White League in Louisiana – who set about crushing the limited gains Black Americans had made after emancipation.

The promise of “40 acres and a mule” – General Sherman’s pledge to grant land to the newly freed – evaporated almost at once. Johnson rescinded the order, restoring plantations to their former owners and evicting those who had begun to farm them. In its place came sharecropping: Black families renting land they had once tilled in bondage, surrendering up to half their harvest for the privilege. Independence was promised; dependence delivered.

After Reconstruction collapsed, white-dominated legislatures across the South moved quickly to enact Jim Crow laws, enforcing segregation in schools, transport, housing and public life. For nearly a century before civil rights reform, Black Southerners were bound by rules controlling where they could live, work and study, whom they could talk to, even the words they were permitted to speak.

America’s road to racial justice has been long, tortuous and bloody – and we’re nowhere near a rest stop, let alone a scenic overlook. But since President Trump’s return to office, we’ve been going in reverse gear.

Within days, the federal DEI framework was dismantled and agencies ordered to abandon “disparate impact” – the key tool for uncovering discrimination hidden in jobs, housing, credit and education. The Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were instructed to roll back cases built on it and to strip out protections first written into law in the 1960s.

School equity guidance was scrapped; racial disparities dismissed as policy flaws rather than structural bias; lawsuits against abusive police departments abandoned; and the court orders meant to reform those departments – in Minneapolis, Louisville and beyond – terminated.

Housing and voting rights are being pulled down the same slope. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is moving to gut fair housing rules, while a sweeping elections order demands proof of citizenship – passport, birth certificate – to register and imposes hard deadlines on mail ballots. These are measures guaranteed to fall heaviest on voters of colour and language-minority communities.

Don’t be fooled: this is a deliberate unpicking of the victories of the civil rights era, in law, in its enforcement and in the story America tells itself about democracy.

Launched in 2018, the U.S. Civil Rights Trail stands as a breakwater against this tide of whitewash, propaganda and historical vandalism – because it can be seen, touched, walked. In these days of state-sanctioned amnesia, visibility is resistance.

Across more than 130 landmarks in 15 states – courthouses and churches, lunch counters and motel balconies – the trail anchors the public record to the ground beneath our feet, holding it fast against its slide toward political conscription. This is the history that should dominate the national conversation, not the mechanical recitation of Civil War battle names by reenactment hobbyists.

To fully grasp what the pursuit of racial justice cost – in courage, sacrifice and blood, in lives cut short, livelihoods destroyed and families broken – we must stand where it happened. Place carries a charge – it casts spells – that words cannot.

X marks the spot where a postbellum war was fought, where Black lives were corralled, confined and deemed second class; where the brave and the ill-starred alike died for the possibility that their children might live differently. To visit these sites is to commune with ghosts – on buses, in waiting rooms, in the poplar trees that once bore strange fruit. They are necessary ghosts, performing a service, caretakers of the republic’s memory and crossing their fingers for its humanity.

Money radix omnium malorum est

There are few places more haunted than Leflore County, Mississippi. Between the end of Reconstruction and 1950 – the era of racial terror, as defined by the Equal Justice Initiative – the county recorded 48 lynchings, the third-highest tally in the nation. I first visited as a student of the blues: Robert Johnson played and died in Greenwood, the county seat; Furry Lewis was born there; and B.B. King spent his childhood nearby. Sorrow stalks the fencerows, though it is easy to mistake the lamentations of ghosts for the keenings of blues musicians – each bears witness to the same grief.

Years later I returned with the remains of a good friend, Maximum, a fellow blues devotee I had promised to show the Delta. I kept that promise in 30 large matchboxes containing his songs – raw recordings on memory sticks – and a letter of introduction written in his voice, explaining our mission. I placed those boxes at musicians’ graves and Mississippi Blues Trail markers, hoping other pilgrims might stumble upon them and reach out to the Twitter account I created in Max’s name – by which ruse his ragged tenor joined the choir of Delta voices that had called him to pick up a guitar.

That month I rented a sharecropper’s cabin at Tallahatchie Flats, off Money Road. Grey clapboard, tin roof, a bare bulb and a box fan. The floorboards spoke mouse and cottonmouths held the lease on the shade beneath the porch. Behind the shack ran the Tallahatchie – the river Bobbie Gentry chose for Billie Joe McAllister’s fatal leap. Swollen and brown, it lurched forward, clumps of swamp privet and buttonbush failing to prettify the scene. At Greenwood it meets the Yalobusha, the two becoming the Yazoo – “the river of death” in local lore, though the original Choctaw meaning is long forgotten.

Crop-dusters buzzed the mornings awake, cicadas laid down a fevered soundtrack and – fortified by generous pours of Old Soul bourbon and a paste of beautyberry leaves “to keep the skeeters honest” – I would hunch over my laptop, hoping the right words would alight on it, Bukka White playing to the empty chair beside me. The nights always fell nervously, shadows turning into ghosts as a wail rose off the flats like a bottleneck over steel.

Emmett Till was murdered a short walk away, in the hamlet of Money, in 1955. He was 14, accused of offending a white grocery store owner – of crossing the colour line with a whistle or an overfamiliar remark. For this, he was abducted, beaten, mutilated and dumped in the Tallahatchie, a cotton gin fan lashed to his neck with barbed wire. Despite overwhelming evidence, the woman’s husband and his half-brother were acquitted by an all-white jury. Protected by double jeopardy, they sold their confession to Look magazine six months later – for what would now be about $40,000.

Till’s death lit a fire under the civil rights movement, and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley¹, understood its potential power. She insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago. More than 50,000 mourners filed past her son’s brutalised body, some fainting at the sight. “When people saw what happened to my son,” she said, “men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalised before.”

NAACP membership grew rapidly and activists in the trenches took their fight to the front line. That December, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus – an act of defiance that spurred a 26-year-old minister, Martin Luther King Jr, to lead the now-historic boycott.

In 2007, eight signs were erected at sites linked to Till’s lynching. The one by the river where his body was found was torn down in 2008, and two replacements were riddled with bullets. In 2018, three University of Mississippi students posed with guns beside the sign and posted the photo online. Their fraternity suspended them, but the university took no action, calling it offensive but not a breach of conduct.

And still people ask me: Why are you digging all that up again?

Can I get a witness?

No one who has visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ) in Montgomery, Alabama, would be so foolish – or so cruel – as to ask me that question. Known colloquially as the National Lynching Memorial, it was created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit that provides legal aid to people who have been wrongfully convicted, unfairly sentenced or mistreated in custody. In April 2018, I attended its opening, along with a justice conference organised by EJI that featured speakers including Ava DuVernay and Gloria Steinem, and a performance by The Roots.

The memorial commemorates more than 4,400 Black people² lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950, the era of racial terror. And to be clear: though often imagined as hangings in remote places, lynching meant any killing carried out without even the pretence of due process.

Law enforcement frequently abetted or stood by, lending a façade of legitimacy. These were not relics of “frontier justice” but crimes committed in towns and counties with functioning courts and sheriffs. The killers were almost never held to account, protected by a culture of impunity that amounted to a licence to murder.

Sitting at the centre of a six-acre site overlooking downtown Montgomery – with the Alabama River coiled beyond and a distant train whistle audible, reminders of the city’s role in the domestic slave trade – the memorial takes the form of an open cloister, its roof hung with 805 weathered steel columns. Each column represents a U.S. county where lynchings were documented, its surface etched with the names, where known, of those killed there. Along the walls, plaques recount their stories.

There is a brutal genius to the structure’s design. At first the columns face you. But as you move through them, the floor gradually falls away, until by the exit the columns hang high overhead. To stand there, a white man gazing upward, is to feel implicated. Not just historically, in the way all history implicates, but viscerally, in the moment. I raised my phone to take a photo, then stopped. How casually a lens transforms a witness into a voyeur – and how swiftly I became part of what I was watching.

For Bryan Stevenson – public interest lawyer, clinical professor at NYU School of Law and founder of EJI – it was imperative to confront the mobs’ bloodlust, the desecration of victims’ bodies and their exhibition as an act of public intimidation.

“The first corridor is meant to invite intimacy with the columns. We want visitors to read the names, even touch the metal. That closeness is necessary before the columns begin to rise. You literally watch this terror and violence lifted above you. Those who committed these acts could have buried bodies, erased evidence, done more without fear of consequence – but lynching was never about concealment.

“Its point was to raise violence up in public. To terrify the entire African-American community by displaying the battered, bloodied bodies they destroyed.”

Deciding how much horror to describe, and how much to withhold, is never simple. The dead are owed dignity no less than the living. Yet silence – which under Trump has become an instrument of the state – is a betrayal, a second burial. The victims’ stories, told with sober clarity, demand a debt of honest revulsion. The record is vast and vile: each lynching its own atrocity, yet together they reveal how easily the law bowed to the mob – a truth all the more chilling when the mob is in power.

Sam Hose, Newnan, Georgia, 1899: dragged from jail, mutilated, chained to a pine tree and burned; pieces of his body sold as souvenirs. Jesse Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916: chained, tortured, castrated and roasted over a fire before a crowd of 10,000; his fingers cut off while he was still alive. Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie, circus workers in Duluth, Minnesota, 1920: seized from jail, hanged from a lamppost before a packed street. (The city later erected the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, conceding their innocence.)

Henry Smith, Paris, Texas, 1893: tortured, soaked in kerosene, set ablaze, immolated before a crowd of 10,000, many of whom arrived by train (read We’ll Always Have Paris… Texas). Mary Turner, Lowndes County, Georgia, 1918: eight months pregnant, lynched upside down; her unborn child cut out of her (EJI’s archive lays out the sequence of their murder with clinical specificity). Laura Nelson and her 12-year-old son, L.D., Okemah, Oklahoma, 1911: broken out of jail, the mother violated, the pair hanged from a bridge; their corpses photographed, the images circulated as postcards.

Since 2015, EJI has worked with communities across the country to remember the victims. Its Community Remembrance Project has collected soil from 700 lynching sites, installed more than 80 historical markers on deeded land, and is now helping more than 200 towns and counties confront their murderous past.

To stand in these places is to listen to those long silenced. The air thickens, the ground stirs. These ghosts do not seek pity or dread, only acknowledgment, to be gathered in the same breath rather than dismissed as anomalies. We were policy, they say – not casualties of some noble war, but machine-tooled cogs in our own demise, sacrificed on the altar of white supremacy.

They ask a question, too, one that few American administrations since the 1960s have had the moral equipment to answer. The pleasure once taken in the painstaking subjugation of one’s fellow man – where did that energy go? Dark forces are not easily vanquished; they mutate. They find new ways to proscribe, degrade and diminish.

Having found new hosts.

Julius Lester (1939–2018) was an author, folk singer, activist and professor. See How the Rain Falls, from his 1967 album Departures, is a spiritual descendant of Abel Meeropol’s Strange Fruit – the foundational protest song about lynching immortalised by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. It recalls a line from Matthew 5:45: “He makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”

It ain’t over till it’s over – and it ain’t ever over

Leaving little doubt as to where that energy went – or the shapes it assumed – the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration opened the same year as its sister site, the NMPJ. It traces an unbroken line from slavery through Jim Crow and the era of racial error to mass incarceration, forced labour, capital punishment and police violence. The message is unmistakable: America didn’t break down the machinery of racial control – it merely retooled it and renamed the parts.

It also contends that today’s inequities are calibrated to what power believes it can get away with. This year, power – ensconced in a White House that confuses vindictiveness for wisdom – seems intent on testing that limit. History rarely forgives such arrogance, yet its verdicts – and with them, justice – tend to arrive too late for those made to suffer by it.

The United States locks up more of its own citizens than almost any other nation on earth – more, proportionally, than any democracy. Nearly two million people are incarcerated on any given day, held in a patchwork of federal and state prisons, local jails and detention centres.

Life sentences have become routine: as of January 2025, about one in six prisoners – nearly 200,000 people – is serving a life term, whether without parole, with parole or a “virtual life” sentence of 50 years or more. The United States also stands alone as the only nation known to impose life without parole on children for crimes committed before the age of 18.

Before the rise of the modern carceral state – the prison-industrial complex – federal surveillance had already defined Black political mobilisation as a threat to internal security. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) targeted civil rights and Black Power organisations, seeking to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralise” groups including the SCLC and the Black Panther Party, conditioning the public to equate Black activism with insurgency and protest with sedition.

In 1971, President Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” and launched an “all-out offensive”. It sounded moral, even medical, but the intent was political. His aide John Ehrlichman later admitted the plan was to weaponise drug policy against Black communities and anti-war activists. A year earlier, the Controlled Substances Act had placed both marijuana and heroin in Schedule I – the most restricted category, reserved for substances deemed to have “no medical use”. By 1973, New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws were mandating 15-to-life sentences for selling just two ounces, or possessing four, of heroin, cocaine or cannabis.

By the 1980s, the U.S. had fully embraced punitive governance. Congress expanded mandatory minimums through the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, installing a new “drug czar” to oversee the crusade. States followed with “three-strikes” laws, the 1994 federal version mandating life for a third serious violent offence.

That year’s Crime Bill poured $9.7 billion into prison construction and paid bonuses to states that forced inmates to serve at least 85 per cent of their sentences. As the National Research Council later observed, mass incarceration was not a reaction to crime but a creation of politics – an edifice built, funded and maintained by design.

These policies hit Black communities hardest at every turn. At street level, an analysis of nearly 100 million traffic stops shows that Black and Latino drivers are searched more often, even though those searches yield contraband less frequently. The “veil of darkness” test – comparing stops before and after sunset – confirms the disparity: when an officer cannot easily discern a driver’s race, stops of Black motorists decline. The pattern holds nationwide, a statistical portrait of bias in everyday policing.

State violence follows the same fault line. In 2024 – the deadliest year for police killings on record – Black Americans, who make up 13 per cent of the population, accounted for more than a quarter of those killed by police. They were 2.9 times more likely than White Americans to die at police hands, while Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native people faced even higher per-capita risks.

The racial gap widens the moment a person is booked. By mid-2023, the Black jail-incarceration rate (552 per 100,000) was 3.6 times the White rate (155). Black defendants are 34 per cent more likely to face a pre-trial detention recommendation and 56 per cent more likely to be detained at the outset. They, along with Latino defendants, face higher bail and are less often released on recognisance. (After Illinois abolished cash bail in 2023, early data outside Chicago showed detention rates falling with no rise in new offences.)

The courtroom only deepens the divide. Under federal law, one gram of crack cocaine is still punished like 18 grams of powder – a relic of the 1980s that racialised drug enforcement. Congress cut the ratio from 100 to 1 in 2010 but never closed it (the EQUAL Act, which would have ended the disparity altogether, stalled in the Senate). Between 2017 and 2021, federal data show Black men received sentences 13.4 per cent longer than comparable white men, Hispanic men 11.2 per cent longer – and both groups were less likely to receive probation.

Capital punishment keeps the colour line intact. Study after study – from the Government Accountability Office to the Death Penalty Information Center – finds the same pattern: more than three-quarters of executions since 1976 have been for crimes against white victims, though barely half of homicide victims are white. Roughly a third of those executed have been Black and federal death authorisations still fall disproportionately on defendants of colour.

With time served, the picture darkens further. Black adults make up nearly a third of the nation’s sentenced prisoners, almost half of whom are serving life, and more than half are condemned to die behind bars. The cycle begins early enough to feel preordained: by 2023, Black youth were 5.6 times more likely than their white peers to be held in juvenile confinement.

The system sustains itself with levers at both ends. Pre-trial, money bail turns poverty into a jailer: in 2022, 466,100 people – seven in ten in local jails – were unconvicted, many there simply because they couldn’t afford to get out. Post-release, community supervision acts as a return chute: in 2021, about 43 per cent of state prison admissions were people sent back for parole or probation violations, roughly 93,000 for technical breaches alone.

Money moves through the prison-industrial complex like an electrical current. Private prisons hold about 8 per cent of America’s inmates, yet many of their contracts guarantee minimum occupancy – “lockup quotas”– that fine states for leaving cells empty. A Justice Department review found more assaults and more contraband in these facilities than in their public equivalents.

Because they’re paid a fixed rate per head, profit depends on cutting corners. Staffing, training and medical care are the first to go. Private officers are younger, less experienced and paid up to 30 per cent less than their public-sector peers. High turnover loses what little expertise exists. Fewer officers mean slower responses, more violence and a system whose efficiency is measured only in human cost.

Profit makes policy. Rehabilitation and lower recidivism threaten revenue; full beds secure it. Private operators are rewarded for retention, not reform. Even the Constitution leaves room for exploitation: the Thirteenth Amendment’s punishment clause still permits coerced prison labour. Around two-thirds of incarcerated people work, and in seven states they receive no pay for most of those jobs – refusal brings reprisals. In California, incarcerated firefighters have long earned about a dollar an hour (in 2025, their pay was raised to the federal minimum during active fires).

At the federal level, prison labour operates through Federal Prison Industries, or UNICOR, a government corporation created in 1934 to provide inmate-made goods and services for federal use. Its catalogue runs from office furniture and uniforms to body armour and electronics. From 2018 to 2022, the Pentagon spent roughly $163 million annually, placing the U.S. military among UNICOR’s biggest clients.

Families are billed for contact. Until new rules took effect, a 15-minute call could cost $15. The Federal Communications Commission capped rates in 2024, though full enforcement was delayed until April 2027, prolonging a revenue stream that punishes the poorest households. Commissary mark-ups run several-fold, with deposit fees in double digits. Outsourced food and healthcare bring the usual scandals – infested kitchens, private firms sued thousands of times for neglect, malpractice and wrongful deaths. And still the contracts roll on.

America’s carceral state is an admission of failure – to educate, to heal, to conceive of justice without cages. Instead of restoring lives, it recycles them through confinement with scant access to education, proper care or meaningful opportunity. And while no administration has ever truly pledged to fix this system – because crime pays those who aren’t charged with it – Trump has poured money into its expansion.

In his second term, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, appropriating $45 billion through 2029 to expand ICE detention – the largest investment of its kind since the 1990s. The plan envisions roughly 100,000 beds across mega-sites, tent cities and revived family camps. Within months, Delaney Hall in New Jersey reopened under a $1 billion, 15-year GEO Group contract, and CoreCivic’s 2,400-bed Dilley facility in Texas returned to service after the White House rescinded President Biden’s 2021 order restricting private-detention contracts.

Across his two terms, Trump has backed policies that widen the net and harden the terms of state control: national stop-and-frisk advocacy; a Justice Department mandate to charge the “most serious, readily provable offence”; the revival of federal executions after a 17-year hiatus (13 executions, 2020–21); and expanded police militarisation, from reinstating the 1033 surplus military programme to deploying federal forces in D.C. and Portland in 2020, and Marines and National Guard units in Los Angeles in 2025 over state objections. He has also signed executive actions to clear homeless encampments and funnel people into institutional custody.

The largest federal investment in the carceral system in a generation is underway, and the phrase “Making America a Gulag Again” no longer sounds like hyperbole. The difference this time is that Trump is big on spectacle: he lives to humiliate his adversaries and to torment his miscreant public, now recast as domestic terrorists. Nothing captures his obsession better than the No Kings video posted to his Truth Social account: a deep-fake fantasia of a smirking monarch dumping faecal matter on his foes — sorry, his fellow citizens.

American apartheid

The free states had long cast the South as the font of all Black America’s suffering – with good reason. On the eve of emancipation, 95 per cent of Black Americans lived there; half a century later, nine in ten still did. The North could denounce Dixie’s cruelty from a safe remove, its virtue untested.

That changed with the Great Migration, when over the next 50 years some six million people fled the lash and boll weevil of the rural South for points north and west in search of safety, dignity and opportunity. The welcome they received was grimly familiar, however.

Where Black people gathered in number, violence found them. The early 20th century brought a wave of riots and lynchings across the North and Midwest, culminating in the “Red Summer” of 1919, when white mobs attacked Black communities in at least two dozen cities – from Chicago and Washington D.C. to Omaha and Knoxville.

In East St Louis, 1917, mobs torched Black wards, shot men in the streets and drove 6,000 from their homes. In Tulsa, 1921, deputised white mobs destroyed “Black Wall Street”, aided by planes dropping incendiaries. In Detroit, 1943, 34 were killed, most of them Black, and by police. The scenery changed; the hatred did not.

The Great Migration didn’t just redraw the map of Black America; it triggered a national backlash – out of which rose the “sundown town”, the non-South’s answer to Jim Crow. From Ohio’s soybean fields to California’s cul-de-sacs, towns wore their racism like medals, posting signs at their limits: Don’t let the sun go down on you here – less a warning than a promise. By day, Black workers could scrub their betters’ floors and pick their crops, but by nightfall they had to vanish – or be made to.

Sociologist James W. Loewen, who wrote the definitive study of these towns, argued that a majority of incorporated places beyond the South once kept out African Americans, a practice that peaked as late as 1970. In Illinois alone, he found evidence of hundreds of municipalities intended to remain white. In the beginning, enforcement came through violence. The Great Migration met the Great Retreat – but the retreat was anything but.

Historians have recorded at least 50 towns, cities and counties across America where Black populations were driven out – sometimes in a single night. Murders, beatings, arson, night rides and posted threats emptied entire communities in Pierce City, Missouri (1901), Decatur, Indiana (1902), Joplin, Missouri (1903), Harrison, Arkansas (1905, 1909), Anna, Illinois (1909, “Anna” becoming shorthand for “Ain’t no n**** allowed”), Marlin, Ohio (1919), Ocoee, Florida (1920), Catcher, Arkansas (1923) and North Platte, Nebraska (1929). By 1930, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – once home to Black lumber and mining workers – had lost virtually all its Black residents.

Nationally, African Americans were the primary quarry, but sundown policies also targeted Chinese Americans in Western towns, Mexican Americans along the border, Jews in certain communities and Native Americans in the Southwest. In Minden and Gardnerville, Nevada, a 1917 ordinance – unchanged until 1974 – ordered Native Americans out of town by 6.30pm, a siren sounding the curfew each evening.

By the middle of the century, the mob’s cudgel had been replaced by the notary’s pen, by deeds, bylaws and neighbourhood associations. Racially restrictive covenants barred non-white buyers outright, their legality reinforced by federal housing policy. The Federal Housing Administration’s 1938 Underwriting Manual warned against “infiltration of inharmonious racial groups” and advised that covenants should “prohibit the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended”.

In central Ohio, researchers estimate that roughly two-thirds of subdivisions platted between the 1920s and the Second World War carried such clauses – a Franklin County review puts the figure at about 68 percent from 1900 to 1945.

Banks redlined entire districts and federal agencies formalised the practice. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s “residential security” maps – now digitised by the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project – lay bare the boundaries of exclusion, city by city.

Realtors were hardly strangers to the concept. The profession’s 1924 Code of Ethics advised agents to avoid “introducing” people of certain races or nationalities into white neighbourhoods, while zoning – through large-lot, single-family requirements and apartment bans – made many suburbs economically exclusive.

Where paper barriers failed, white hostility and compliant police held the line. Stops, threats “for your own safety” and escorts to the city limits became the standard practice of sundown enforcement. Black travellers recall the ritual: the fixed smile, the fake ticket, the warning to “move along”. Fear did the rest. The Negro Motorist Green Book – Victor H. Green’s indispensable ledger of survival – listed the vanishingly few places a Black traveller could eat, refuel or sleep without danger.

Structural segregation

After the Second World War, the visible trappings of sundown towns faded, but their purpose endured, carried forward through law, finance, real-estate and local planning. Although Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) prevented courts from enforcing racial covenants and later legislation such as the Fair Housing Act outlawed certain housing discrimination, the engines of the post-war housing boom – federal underwriting standards, private industry codes, zoning and highways – kept segregation alive under new management.

Programmes operated by the FHA and Veterans Administration channelled cheap credit to white suburbs while denying comparable opportunities to Black neighbourhoods. The GI Bill, designed to reward service with home ownership and education, repeatedly failed many Black veterans – if not on paper, in practice. They had fought for freedom abroad, only to be denied it at home.

Road construction entrenched the divide. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act sent bulldozers through Black neighbourhoods, uprooting families and gouging new corridors to the suburbs. Officials called it “slum clearance”.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, interstate construction displaced an estimated one million people and severed minority communities. To repair some of that damage, the department created the Reconnecting Communities Pilot, a Biden-era initiative. Since January, Trump has frozen funds, announcing no new awards and backing attempts to reclaim earlier grants.

Since the Great Migration, much of American – that is, Black – cultural life had drawn its power from the city – only to find the city turning on it. Urban renewal and HOPE VI schemes demolished nearly 100,000 public housing units, with few original tenants returning.

By the 2000s, younger white professionals were buying into newly “walkable” downtowns, and their parents followed to help with childcare. White return – more apt than gentrification – replaced white flight. Streets were reclaimed like lost property, and the people who made them – in districts rich in art, music and memory – were shown the door, priced out of the very picture they had painted.

Today, a majority of Black Americans live in suburbs rather than historic urban centres, with the “New Great Migration” shifting the centre of gravity southward into metropolitan belts long past their prime. Between 2019 and 2022, more than 60 per cent of the national rise in poverty occurred in suburban areas, and in major metros it grew nearly three times faster than in their central cities. The post-war dream has flipped: these are now communities of need, where resources are thin and opportunity distant.

In January 2024, HUD’s annual point-in-time count³ identified 771,480 people experiencing homelessness – about one in 430 Americans. Black people, representing 13 per cent of the U.S. population, made up 32 per cent of them. The numbers reflect a broad consensus across federal and non-profit research: that structural racism in housing, labour markets and the criminal-legal system still dictates who is left without shelter.

Home invasion

Next year, America marks its sestercentennial – its 250th anniversary. But the Land of the Free has only been free for all, in law, since 1964–65. In the moral sense it likes to project, the nation is barely 60 years old.

Empires burn bright and brief – just ask the British, Spanish, Mongols and Assyrians. History shows they rarely last three centuries, and America’s own high-imperial phase – the post-1945 era of global reach, cultural export and military supremacy – is already well into its second act.

Its power remains immense, but the symptoms of late empire are familiar: yawning inequality, paralysed politics, eroding faith in institutions. Like Rome in its third century or Britain after Suez, it stands beyond the midpoint between confidence and decline, still proclaiming exceptionalism while privately reckoning with its limits.

Since 1945, Washington has generally projected its domestic unease outward. The Cold War provided the template: when division or stagnation loomed at home, a crisis abroad was summoned to restore purpose and unity. From Tehran to Guatemala, Saigon to Santiago, coups and covert wars became a kind of civic therapy – the performance of leadership standing in for the loss of cohesion. The message was liberty; the method, destabilisation.

The reflex that armed the Contras and bombed Cambodia resurfaced in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan – each sold as a crusade for order. Africa and Latin America remain strewn with the wreckage of American regime change: Congo, Chile, Angola, Honduras and Haiti, nations broken or bled dry in the name of stability. What began as the containment of communism hardened into the pursuit of capital – energy, resources, bases, markets, contracts – blurring the line between patriotism and profiteering, where the flag is merely branding and victory incidental.

The difference now is stark. There was once a tacit understanding that global interventionism carried a human overhead – that refugees were to be taken in as a kind of moral tithe, payment for the plunder. But Trump has declared the debt settled and turned on those who came to the States as part of that bargain. Despite making noise about Greenland and dropping bombs on Iran, Yemen and a few fishing trawlers, Trump has eyes for only one battlefield – and it’s domestic.

It makes sense: Trump’s world atlas, like baseball’s World Series, is missing a few countries. The Department of Defense – a name that once implied an overseas enemy – has been rechristened the Department of War. The border wall, the deportation dragnet, the assaults on civil servants, journalists and protesters – they are all part of the same internal counter-insurgency. The hardware of empire has come home.

Given this newsletter’s subject, it bears repeating – loudly – that ethno-nationalism is running the current shitshow. No one’s pretending otherwise. Trump’s cabinet is a pitiful crew, chosen either for their inexperience or proven incompetence by a man who can’t abide competition, but the hate radiating from them is real, and power turns them on as surely as it does their master.

It’s going to take civil rights-era vision and valour to resist what’s coming.

¹ Weeks before the jury met, Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, a staunch segregationist and plantation owner, dug up information on Louis Till, Emmett’s father, and leaked it to the press. The U.S. Army had executed him in Italy in 1945 for raping two Italian women and killing a third. The insinuation: Emmett's behaviour ran in the family. Mamie turned to the federal government for help, to no avail. She had not received her ex-husband's army records, so she asked how a senator could get hold of that information. President Dwight Eisenhower refused her request to meet him.

² EJI has now documented nearly 6,500 lynchings from 1865 to 1950 (combining their earlier more than 4,400 count for 1877–1950 with cases for 1865–1876).

³ Point-in-time counts capture only a single night and likely understate the scale of unsheltered homelessness, but they remain the most consistent national measure.

The Road has always been something of an abstraction to me – which might explain how I burned through five odometers before I could even grind a gear. By the age of eight, I’d lapped the States a thousand times, cross-legged on the lino, a dog-eared Rand McNally limp across my lap.

Forty years of actual driving later, little has changed. The journey is still as interior as it is exterior. My trips are never short of concrete excitements – I can list every delicious detail, from the Hawaii licence plate I spotted outside a Dairy Queen in Kansas to the five‑year‑old pointing proudly to her “FRee PeCANs” sign nailed to a live oak outside Macon – but without fail, about an hour into every drive, my mind sheds its earthly harness. I find myself in two lanes at once, fully present yet somehow… gone. Call it highway hypnosis if you’re selling fridge magnets – but what I do is enter a state of raw grace, rapt in the rolling now.

America didn’t invent the car, or roads for that matter, but The Road, which is the precise coordinate where rubber meets manifest destiny, is an American creation. I’ve driven its analogues elsewhere, across the Namib Desert, between Delhi and Nagpur, through the Northern Territory and down into Patagonia. And though each artery is vital to those who travel it – and far from culturally void – none sits at the heart of a national imagination the way Route 66, the Pacific Coast Highway or the Blue Ridge Parkway do.

In the U.S., The Road is all its roads – snarled up in the country’s psyche, freighted with promise and threat, the urge to escape and the pull to return. It’s where America sins, atones and goes to dump the evidence.

If I once mistook it for a romance, it’s probably because I’d never had to grade, pour or maintain so much as a driveway. But really, it goes deeper than that. I grew up in England – a country too small to escape, its wilderness the stuff of tea towels. Had I been born American, I’d have lit out for the Territory at 14, just like Huck Finn.

Wanderlust is in my marrow, though for years I couldn’t locate its source. I longed to slip my beginnings – to shed the scars, tics and tells that give us away to others and render us legible to ourselves. I yearned to transplant myself and let some richer, stranger world have a go at growing me. In the hope that my little spring might one day become its own Mississippi.

With 250,000 miles under my seatbelt, I suspect The Road has had its fill of me. Even so, it remains the best way to tap the bloodstream of the country that mythologised it. And now, in an age of institutionalised mendacity and digital retreat from the real world of consequences, there’s never been a fiercer need for journalists to do their job: to get out there, to hold America’s illusions up to the light and set human truth against the stagecraft of a soft-core dictatorship.

The Road still markets itself as boundless – a blacktop birthright, horizon as inheritance – but these days its liberties are severely rationed, and booby-trapped. Surveillance waits at the ramps. ICE squads lurk like ticks in the brush. A single fault – a busted tail-light, the wrong shade of skin – can summon the machinery of the state. Freedom that fragile is no freedom at all, only a loan that can be recalled without notice.

Until Trump’s goon show learns the meaning of equity, minority America may need a digital successor to the Green Book, an app that crackles like a Geiger counter when Homeland Security’s around – proof that “the land of the free” has become a fallout zone.

Part love letter, part coroner’s report, my forthcoming book – No Swimming at the Holiday Inn: Waking Up from the American Dream One Motel at a Time – takes a scalpel to the lie that America belongs to everyone. The motels are chosen with care, each one a point of entry in an autopsy of American life and culture – race, guns, education, health, drugs, religion, homelessness. Together, they reveal a nation still flogging the dream even as it evicts the dreamers.

Highway 24 fps

It took a German to make the great American road movie.

Paris, Texas was born of frustration. Wim Wenders had spent five long years locked in a tug-of-war with Francis Ford Coppola over Hammett¹ and came away feeling “creatively handcuffed”. He swore that his next film would be lean, fast and free. Having finished his European “road trilogy” (Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, Kings of the Road) in 1976, he had a hankering “to tell a story about America” in the cinematic idiom he had made his own.

In early 1983, scouting the American West for the film, he spent weeks on the road with a Plaubel Makina 6×7 and enough Kodachrome to fill a mail sack. His route took him out of the Mojave, through Arizona and New Mexico and into the pump-jack towns of West Texas. He photographed shuttered diners, derelict picture houses, sun-bleached billboards – images later gathered in his book Written in the West – and kept going until the landscape seemed to embody the American condition.

Back in Los Angeles he reconnected with playwright-actor Sam Shepard, whom he’d first met on the Hammett set in 1981. Shepard handed over a notebook he called “Transfiction”, which was published as Motel Chronicles a year later. The slim, scrapbook-like volume’s mix of memoir, prose portraits and poetry became the new film’s tonal compass, and a handful of its scenes² made it verbatim into the movie.

Principal photography started in the Devil’s Graveyard near Terlingua, Texas, in September, and - true to Wenders’ road-movie method – rolled almost entirely in story order for ten weeks, pausing mid-shoot so Shepard, already committed elsewhere, could phone in a new ending before cameras rolled again.

For the rough cut, Wenders temp-tracked Ry Cooder’s 1970 recording of Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 gospel blues Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground. Hearing it against Robby Müller’s cinematography, Cooder resolved to build the entire score around its mournful, modal mood.

Paris, Texas tells a deceptively simple story. Travis Henderson – Harry Dean Stanton’s red-capped drifter – staggers out of the desert, clutching dreams of home like a map he can no longer read. Found by his brother and returned to the house where his son has been raised in his absence, Travis relearns, haltingly, what it means to be a father. At last he makes a tentative peace with himself, then sets off with the boy to find the woman they both lost.

Travis stays silent for the first 26 minutes – a deliberate choice, not a budgetary necessity. Wenders wanted the audience to “hear the landscape think”. Beneath the spare soundtrack lie field recordings: the low rumble of tyres, the mosquito buzz of fluorescent light, the frying-pan crackle of high-voltage lines, even the keening of a flagpole halyard in the wind. Cooder recorded that wind in E-flat and tuned the score to it, so the land stays in key, breathing softly whenever the music falls away.

Müller’s lens sanctifies the Southwest, rendering oxidised signage, pitted gas pumps and peeling motel fronts as roadside reliquaries – the “sacred wasteland”, as he liked to call it. Yet the road grants Travis no pardon. Each mile reads like an entry in a dossier of time and love already lost, and the distance between waste and hope never closes. In the end, he does the one decent thing left to him – reuniting his son with his mother – then steps aside, knowing it’s as close to redemption as he will come.

Though the film sees America through a European lens, it maps the country’s emotional topography with uncanny fidelity. The story moves like a slow fugue on separation, family and belonging, while the town of the same name – the home Travis can’t return to – hovers at the edge of the frame, present only in its absence.

Cut in 1927 in a makeshift Columbia studio in Dallas’s Jefferson Hotel, Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground may be the most transcendent three minutes in American music. The blind busker tuned his guitar to open D and let droning bass strings underpin slide figures that never settle into major or minor, suspending the harmony in perpetual midnight. Over that, he sings low and wordless, echoing the cadences of lined-out Baptist prayer and, through the hymn that gives the song its title, Christ’s agony in Gethsemane. Grief and hope fight over every breath Johnson takes.

Johnson’s lament found its way onto the Voyager Golden Record, the gold-plated disc of 115 images, natural sounds, 55 greetings and 90 minutes of music that Carl Sagan’s team prepared for NASA in 1977. Two identical discs were bolted to Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, now more than 23 and 19 billion kilometres from Earth, both beyond the Sun’s heliosphere. Their generators are running on fumes, yet the probes still trickle back magnetic field and plasma data as mission controllers shut down instruments one by one, eking out the last watts of plutonium power.

A murderous inheritance

Paris, Texas – there’s melancholy there. And no little cruelty. Travis recalls how his father would introduce his mother as “The girl I met in Paris…” – pausing just long enough for people to picture pétanque under plane trees and bouquinistes along the Seine, before cutting the fantasy short with a triumphant – “– Texas!” and roaring at his own wit. The gag is pure spite, reducing a wife to a punchline, consigning her to the red dirt and feedlots of small-town life.

Something darker than melancholy coloured my thoughts in 2021 as I steered north on U.S. 75, leaving Dallas for my first encounter with the real Paris, Texas, just eight miles shy of the Oklahoma line. After reading James W. Loewen’s Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, I’d offered to assist with the archive³ he was building – to gather testimony and take photographs. Paris was on Loewen’s list, a town where Black residents and travellers once risked beatings, arson or worse if they lingered after dark, and I wanted to see if it had accounted for its crimes.

Historians have recorded 12 racial-terror lynchings in Lamar County – whose seat is Paris – between 1892 and 1920. The cases listed below, in chronological order, are those whose victims’ names can be confirmed. To be clear: by lynching we mean extrajudicial killing – death at the hands of a mob, without even the pretence of legal process.

In late July 1892, white planter John Ashley shot dead Black sharecropper Jarrett Burns during a quarrel over a horse. When local officials refused even to indict him, Black neighbours formed a short-lived “coloured association” to press for justice. On August 30, a white posse attempted to lynch Burns’s niece, 18-year-old Ella Ransom. She slipped the noose and rode back into Paris under armed escort from farmhands John Ransom, John Walker and William Armor, then filed a complaint. To white Paris, the sight was heresy: “insolence” of the highest order.

Just after midnight on September 6, a masked band of around 30 vigilantes dragged the three men from their cabins, marched them two miles into the pine woods east of Paris, hanged each from a separate tree limb, and riddled the bodies with bullets. To justify their atrocity, the killers pinned to Ransom’s trousers a crudely forged “oath” warning that the town would be torched and whites murdered if Ashley were not prosecuted.

On February 1, 1893, Henry Smith – a 17-year-old Black handyman described locally as “harmless” and “weak-minded” – was accused, on flimsy evidence and a coerced confession, of raping and murdering the three-year-old daughter of a white police officer. Hauled into town, he was paraded on a mule-drawn carnival float to the Paris fairgrounds, where a ten-foot scaffold had been built on the racetrack for his execution before some 10,000 spectators, many delivered by special excursion trains from Dallas and beyond.

There, for nearly an hour, the child’s relatives tortured Smith with red-hot irons, burning his feet, throat, eyes and torso before dousing him in kerosene and setting him ablaze. The crowd cheered each of his screams while vendors sold lemonade and snacks, transforming the killing into a grotesque picnic. Two local photographers documented the horror, and within days their cabinet-card prints and postcards were circulating across northeast Texas.

On July 6, 1920, some 3,000 Parisians stormed the Lamar County jail and seized Herman Arthur – a decorated Great War veteran – and his 17-year-old brother, Irving. The two had fatally shot white farmer John Hodges in what witnesses later confirmed was self-defence during a wage dispute. Dragged to the fairgrounds, they were burned alive on the very spot where Smith had met his end. Their charred remains were then lashed to an automobile and driven through a Black ward in a grisly motorcade.

While the gang exulted in their brutality, three Arthur sisters – aged 20, 17 and 14 – were locked in the jail basement “for their protection”, only to be stripped, beaten and gang-raped by as many as 20 white men. When the attackers left, they tossed the sisters a side of bacon, a sack of flour and a pail of molasses, warning them never to return to Paris. Within six weeks, using its “Great Northern Drive” migration network, the Chicago Defender – then the nation’s most influential Black newspaper – had spirited the sisters and their parents north to Illinois.

In every case, mob violence cut the wires on due process, turning shaky allegations into deadly certainties. County officials never indicted anyone for the killings of Ransom, Walker and Armor. After Smith’s immolation, Governor James H. Hogg wired Paris officials demanding a grand jury inquiry, only to be told they were “helpless” to act. And in the Arthur case, although five white men were indicted for first-degree murder, judges either directed acquittals or let the charges expire for “lack of evidence”. Together, these episodes reveal with pitiless clarity the culture of impunity that sustained racial terror in Paris, Texas.

Paris, then, is due a reckoning it has put off for generations, and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is working with its residents to make that possible. Founded in 1989 by civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, the non-profit still spends most days in court, standing with the unjustly convicted, unfairly sentenced or mistreated in custody. Yet Stevenson argues that justice in the present cannot be separated from honesty about the past. Hence EJI’s “memory work”: public projects that compel America – especially the towns and counties that enacted and witnessed such violence – to confront its legacy of racial terror.

In downtown Montgomery, Alabama, that mission has taken powerful physical form. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ), which opened in 2018, honours more than 4,400 victims of lynching. Their names are etched into more than 800 weathered steel columns, each suspended within a roofed open-air cloister and representing a single U.S. county.

The memorial’s design has a stark genius. As you walk through it, the ground falls away until, at the exit, the columns are hanging high above your head. To stand there, a white man gazing upward, is to feel implicated – as history’s accomplice. My revulsion at my place in the tableau was almost consoling: the shudder of recognition, a reminder that complicity must first be felt before it can be faced.

A few blocks away, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration houses EJI’s Community Remembrance Project. The programme partners with counties willing to engage with their murderous past, beginning with a local coalition that researches lynching cases; collects soil from the site of the killing in a public ceremony; and drafts the text for a historical marker naming the victims and describing their fate. Once a nearby plot of land is secured, the marker – a blue and gold metal sign – is cast, mounted on a post and formally unveiled.

Since 2015, the Project has worked with communities across the country to install more than 80 historical markers and collect soil from 700 lynching sites, and it is supporting over 200 additional coalitions as new ceremonies are planned. The Legacy Museum displays the labelled jars of soil and the NMPJ exhibits replica markers.

In early July 2020, around the centennial of the Arthur brothers’ lynching, descendants of both the Arthur and Hodges families gathered at Paris’s Red River Valley Veterans Memorial. An apology was offered; Janese Walton-Roberts, the brothers’ grand-niece, spoke about the need for forgiveness, and participants discussed working with EJI on a historical marker.

The following summer, a few months after my visit, the newly formed Community Remembrance Coalition led a half-mile commemorative walk from the old jail to the fairgrounds. The group is pursuing soil collection, working on the text and the siting of a marker. As per EJI’s process, the final step is securing local approval for a public site where it can be installed.

An EJI Community Remembrance Project marker for Tuscaloosa County, Alabama

Wish you were here?

Paris was in a brisk, boosterish mood the Saturday I arrived. Every smile was wide, every handshake firm, the choreography of civic pride worthy of Martha Graham in a country club blazer. A farmers’ market was in full swing, and stalls sagged beneath a burlesque show of abundance: yellow-fleshed watermelons hacked open by machetes, their pulp casting a hazmat glow; cantaloupes stacked like ordnance; and peaches dripping down their own chins, faintly cannibalistic.

Cakes for a year’s worth of birthdays slumped in the 30C heat. Jars of mayhaw jelly stood in parade formation, lids pinging in the sun, while stallholders fanned their trays and wasps cruised the trestles like health inspectors on the take.

For the hemp-bag set – kombucha in hand, virtue to go – there were pastel-coloured bricks of goat-milk soap, gourd art straight out of a peyote vision, bowl koozies stitched in cult captivity, smudge sticks bundled like dynamite and raw-milk chocolate handed over with an R.F.K. Jr. wink at its higher microbiological risk.

Most of the traders were white; the customers mixed, their kids chasing each other. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this. My mind, loaded with the past, couldn’t settle in the moment. Every time I tried, a band seemed to strike up – not a real band, just the performance of prosperity. And beneath it, my own voice, whispering: Isn’t this better? We should not mourn the miseries of others.

Downtown – a jumble of Victorian, Italianate and Art Deco facades – was rebuilt in short order after fire consumed 30 blocks of Paris in 1916. The Classical Revival courthouse, its walls fashioned from salvaged pink granite and terracotta, once held the jail – the one from which the Arthurs were “liberated”. You can’t help but think that when this phoenix rose from the ashes, it didn’t take everyone with it.

It was then that I felt a tap on my shoulder. Ayanna – an online friend I’d arranged to meet after hearing she was back in Paris visiting family – was standing there, grinning. “You stick out like a sore Brit,” she said.

We bought coffees and sat by the Culbertson Fountain, the Carrara-marble centrepiece of the plaza. Imported from Italy and assembled in the 1920s, it was a gift from J.J. Culbertson, a cottonseed oil magnate and philanthropist, and was intended to mark Paris’s rebirth.

“This is all illusion. They called it a rebirth, but it was the same town with the same families holding the keys. Nothing new came into the world. No one held a baby shower for us,” said Ayanna, 38. Raised in a politically engaged household, she studied political science at Texas A&M–Texarkana and now works for a tenants’ advocacy group in Dallas.

“Plenty of people don’t know about the lynchings, or act like they don’t. The ones who do know – some get mad if you mention it, others say they got what they deserved. Paris was never a sundown town in the classic sense – no signs telling Black folks to move on – and by the time Henry Smith was murdered, we were about a fifth of the town. We’ve always been here. A captive audience, you might call it.”

She pointed across the square. “Over there, on the courthouse lawn, is the Confederate memorial. That tells you all you need to know. I’ve seen people tip their hats to it. But there’s nothing to signify what else happened here. And you can’t fix what you won’t name.”

We walked and talked, covering a lot of ground and catching stares. Brandon McClelland’s name surfaced – in 2008 he was struck by and dragged beneath a pickup on a county road, and prosecutors let the murder case collapse. We talked about the workplaces – Turner Industries, the pipe-fabrication plant, and Sara Lee, the confectionery factory, now closed – where racism wasn’t just tolerated but baked in. In Paris, the past and present conspire to stop a just future from taking shape.

“After George Floyd’s murder last year there were petitions and demonstrations to move the courthouse statue,” Ayanna said. “The opposition was loud and immediate. Local news called it a stalemate but never gave the context. It dredged up a lot of bad blood. Brenda Cherry, the civil rights activist, has been tireless, but one woman can’t keep the conscience of a city by herself.”

Racist graffiti, Confederate flags – even nooses – have appeared in workplaces. In schools, Black students are punished at more than twice the rate of their white classmates – suspended for infractions that others walk away from – each detention a rehearsal for the carceral system. Racialised policing is standard. The message is constant: some lives carry the weight of fear while others carry the presumption of innocence.

Before leaving Ayanna at her aunt’s, I stopped by the city’s own Eiffel Tower – a diminutive, 65ft version built by the local welders’ union in 1993. A red cowboy hat the size of a small UFO was added in 1998, and its LEDs now flash red and green at Christmas, pink or blue for gender-reveal parties. The whole thing looked like a hole on a Vegas-scale crazy-golf course.

Ayanna waved off the idea of a selfie. “I’ll stand for one by the EJI marker when it finally goes up – if it ever does. Around here folks say, ‘Forget it, move on. Tomorrow’s another day. The past is past.’ But for us, the book’s not closed – it’s still being written, the ink’s still wet. People shrug and say, ‘Ain’t nobody getting killed now’ like that settles the score. But it don’t. And it ain’t even true.”

Back in town, I spent some time at the Confederate memorial, the work of Pompeo Coppini, the sculptor later responsible for San Antonio’s Alamo Cenotaph. The local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy raised $2,500 for the monument and presented it in 1903. A soldier stands on top, rifle in hand, locked in unceasing vigil. Around the base sit busts of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, the Civil War’s highest-ranking battlefield casualty, killed at Shiloh in 1862.

Beside me, a man in his sixties – who might have passed for David Strathairn after a 40-year bender – scrolled cattle prices on his phone. I tried to break the ice with some nonsense: “Nothing like a wet spring to ease herd pressure and push futures up.” Which he ignored. His silence held, taut and deliberate, until a newcomer arrived, eager to occupy it.

At first, Mike, a fourth-generation Parisian in his forties, sighed hard enough to rattle the courthouse windows. “If they get their way, that statue’ll be ripped out faster’n lightning. Rubs folks raw. Where they gonna dump it? Behind Walmart, among the lawn chairs and ice chests, priced like a blue-light special. Won’t be long before there’s a clearance sticker hanging off that rifle.”

Mike had served with the Texas Army National Guard, worked at Turner Industries, married late and now had a seven-year-old daughter. He wanted it known that he was invested in the community – the whole community.

“But I don’t want to feel bad about things that happened before I was born,” he said. “That soldier stands for every farm boy who grabbed a muzzle-loader to protect his family. My great-granddaddy broke horses right here,never owned a slave. Folks want to paint everybody with the same brush. You start yanking monuments every time somebody’s feelin’s get tender, you’ll wind up with nothing but textbooks telling our story for us – and those books won’t have much good to say.”

The cattle-price scroller – with a drawl that could strip the varnish off a coffin lid, his breath sour with what I fancied was Yellow Rose whiskey – came alive. “These n*****s runnin’ around think they somethin’, but they ain’. They never learn. Give me five minutes and I’ll show ’em how quick they can be taught.”

He finally looked up from his phone. “You fixin’ to stir a hornet’s nest, boy? We don’t need it. Things been workin’ just fine. They know better than to step outta line.”

I put up my hands in spoof surrender, shaking my head. Mike stiffened but didn’t contradict him. Aiming for safer ground, he talked about his daughter’s school concerts, about knowing half the town by sight. The small-town catechism, recited to sound rooted, reasonable. Maybe he wanted racial harmony, or thought he did, but it demands more than talk, and he couldn’t manage that.

Bonfire of the sanities

Neighbours described it as “a place you could walk into on your worst day and leave lighter”. A squat, wood-frame sanctuary on NE 13th Street, its walls held the sound of gospel choirs, the smell of Sunday dinners in foil pans, the hush of prayer circles gathered when work was scarce or bills were due.

The Love Tabernacle Church – standing for just three short years – was gutted by fire late on September 29 last year, only hours after two racial slurs were spray-painted across its walls, including a sundown-style injunction to “leave town”. Photographs of the graffiti, shared nationwide, shocked even those long inured to East Texas racism. The building was declared a total loss. No injuries were reported.

Services will continue in Cooper, Texas, Pastor Tristan Love vowed. “Our building is gone,” he told supporters, “but our church isn’t”.

Paris Police Captain Terry Bull said the case was “not being investigated by the police department” and was “solely a fire investigation”. The Texas State Fire Marshal joined the city’s fire marshal on the inquiry, but no hate-crime charge has followed – which looks a lot like an attempt to launder an act of racial intimidation as petty vandalism.

Speaking to KXII News 12 after the fire, Brenda Cherry said: “I’ve been doing this for a long time, and things don’t get better because they’re not addressed. They’re glossed over or hidden… I’ve not known of a Black church being burned before – not in this era – but racist graffiti, that’s a common thing. City officials need to engage with this, not fear it will create racial tension – clearly, we already have that.”

And it is to Ms Cherry – president and co-founder of the Paris non-profit Concerned Citizens for Racial Equality – that I turn for the last word on where Paris, Texas is today. We corresponded last week, and her perspective carries the authority of decades spent pressing the town to face truths it would rather bury.

“The broadcaster Paul Harvey once said Paris is ‘Where tomorrow fell in love with yesterday, and side by side, they lived happily ever after’. He meant it as a compliment, but it still fits – Paris is in love with yesterday. Not all of it, naturally. But people cling to the Confederate statue, the flags – and the mindset.

“When outside reporters write about the lynchings in Paris, they’re accused of stirring up trouble. They say the same about me, and I’m no outsider. They don’t acknowledge injustice because they don’t have to. There’s nobody to complain to. We’re stuck in a time capsule – somewhere between the Civil War and the 1950s. Closed minds, closed hearts.

“They say we’re ‘playing the race card’. That’s just a way to dodge the issue. After the Shaquanda Cotton case⁵, they set up a Racial Diversity Task Force – then dropped the word ‘racial’. They held ‘conversations’ where you couldn’t talk about race. You had to write questions on slips of paper, and they picked which ones to answer.

“There have been many complaints about how police deal with the Black community. Instead of sitting down with people and listening, they hired a Black officer a couple of years ago and started handing out hot dogs to poor Black kids – ‘tea with a cop’ they called it.

“Most Black people won’t complain out loud – they fear retaliation. I’ve had threats and insults for years. My view is, if I’m not getting pushback, I’m probably not doing my job as an activist.

“White people here, for the most part, are big Trump fans. There have been Trump parades. The police are big Trump supporters, of course.

“Sometimes exposure is the only accountability in a place where racism gets swept under the rug. But when the cameras leave, things slip back. Even so, I’m going to stay hopeful. As Sam Cooke sang, ‘A change is gonna come’. As far as Trump goes: he’s 79; he’s a temporary problem.”

Erasure and indoctrination

Wenders and Shepard knew nothing of this fraught history when they made Paris, Texas. Wenders chose the town’s name purely for its lyrical dissonance – the crew never set foot there. The director can hardly be blamed for missing what Paris itself was determined to conceal.

And now, nine months into Trump’s second act, calculated amnesia has returned as policy. Executive Order 14151 dismantled every DEI office across the federal government, pulling equity requirements from grants and contracts. EO 14173 went further, vapourising Lyndon Johnson’s EO 11246 and scrapping affirmative action for federal contractors.

The purge extends to culture. The White House has directed the Smithsonian to “restore American exceptionalism” and clean up its exhibits for the nation’s 250th anniversary, which, from here, is beginning to look like a pep rally with the blood sluiced from the floor. National parks, too, have been ordered to flag or bin signage about slavery, Native dispossession, climate damage – anything “disparaging”.

This isn’t historical revisionism by academic footnote. It’s state-sanctioned forgetting, with a marching band. A reheated nostalgia buffet for a 21st century audience already hooked on the junk. All that’s missing is a snow globe of Happy Plantation Life and a 4K Song of the South: Heritage Edition.

¹ Wenders’ first American feature, Hammett, became a textbook case of auteur warfare. He shot it on San Francisco streets, only to reshoot most of it under Coppola’s watch on Zoetrope soundstages. The result is so disjointed that one wonders how the man behind The Godfather ever managed to deliver a coherent film at all, let alone a masterpiece. Wenders later claimed Zoetrope destroyed his original negative, killing any chance of a director’s‑cut resurrection.

² Including Travis’s peep show confession

³ Since his death in August 2021, the archive James W. Loewen began building in the late 1990s has been available online at justice.tougaloo.edu. Loewen taught race relations at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi – a historically Black institution– for two decades, and the project is now maintained by University of Michigan historian Stephen Berrey and still inviting crowd‑sourced updates

The physical paper archive – boxes of newspaper clippings, census print‑outs, interview transcripts, correspondence and drafts that underpin the website – is housed in the L. Zenobia Coleman Library at Tougaloo. Researchers wishing to consult these materials may do so by appointment: the archive is open not just to students, but also to faculty and the general public.

Additionally, Tougaloo collaborates with the Mississippi Department of Archives & History to preserve and make available select portions of its civil rights and individual collections – among them the James W. Loewen Collection (T/021), containing writings from his years at Tougaloo.

⁴ EJI has now documented nearly 6,500 lynchings from 1865 to 1950 (combining their earlier more than 4,400 count for 1877–1950 with cases for 1865–1876).

⁵ Shaquanda Cotton, a 14‑year‑old Black student in Paris, was adjudicated delinquent in 2006 for shoving a hall monitor and sent to the Texas Youth Commission for up to seven years, sparking national outrage when it emerged the same judge had recently given probation to a white 14‑year‑old in an arson case. She was released in March 2007 amid wider scrutiny of Texas’s juvenile‑justice system, though an appeals court later upheld the adjudication.

AT SOMEONE’S NOD, I forget whose, we neck our coffees, bin the styrofoam and move as one, picking our way through a whooping, unsteady crowd. We clamber through a barricade intended to keep the underage, the improperly dressed and the obviously wasted off the streets, where the mood is markedly less festive. We, the runners, are out in number, and many of us have been out all night, but fear – let’s call it what it is – has cleared our heads.

There’s some waiting to be done, so we mill around. We might look like protesters if what was in our heads were fit to put on a placard. Soon enough, our fears become nerves and, with our feeble jokes, cracked knuckles and pissoir whistles, we’re not fooling anyone, least of all ourselves.

The thing is, we know what’s coming. Although we don’t really, not exactly, and that’s the problem. This is an unpredictable business. Another 20 minutes pass. I follow some locals down to the start of the course, where a niche in a high wall holds the statuette of a saint. We beseech him to keep us safe, then head back to our “lucky” spots, newspapers screwed tight in our fists.

Not long now. We study our phones, the soles of our trainers, the backs of our hands. To check the time, the company we’re keeping, for signs of wear and tear – searching, as one does in tea leaves or coffee grounds, for confirmation that today isn’t our day and we’d be wiser to duck out and let this madness be. Those of us who care to, and many of us who don’t, make the sign of the cross.

At 8am a rocket sounds. A gate opens in our heads and nightmares briefly swarm. A few beats later a second rocket goes off and panic or preparedness – which is nothing but heavily drilled panic – takes over.

Before we know it, they’re upon us, although we don’t see them immediately. The first wave to hit is human, and that wave – already ragged – breaks as legs give out, unable to outrun six peak-condition fighting bulls and their companion steers

In turn, we move, scattering like dice, trying our luck – some of us keeping pace with the herd or sprinting ahead of it for a few jubilant seconds, while others – others, we hope – succumb to the stampede, falling under feet and hooves, or flatten themselves against the walls, guts sucked in, wishing they were shadows or smoke. A glancing blow from one of these toros bravos will open you up like it’s Christmas.

And so the run continues, section by section, for just over half a mile, the bulls averaging half a ton and 15mph – even on these winding streets – and the runners hoping that whichever god or philosophy they cling to is paying attention. And that medical help is standing by.

YES, I’M IN PAMPLONA, in the Navarre region of northern Spain, and it’s the third day of the 424-year-old festival of San Fermín, which is held each year from July 6 to 14 and has the encierro, or bull run, at its heart. There's a run each morning from the seventh, starting at the foot of the Cuesta de Santo Domingo, where the bulls are released from a corral, and finishing at the Plaza de Toros, where they meet their end in the afternoon.

Most mornings, about 2,000 people take to the streets. They're a mixed bag, the runners, the corredores, the mozos. Many are locals and most of those are Basque, a people whose relationship with the bull runs Minoan-deep. Then come the usual suspects: self-styled daredevils who’ve exhausted their bungee options; and gap-year hopefuls in white tees emblazoned with the logo of the tour operator that marooned them on a wasteland campsite miles out of town, in what it had the gall to call an “executive package”.

Finally, the fiesta faithful – the foreigners, the guiris – whose passions for Spanish culture, cooking and wine, tauromachy, American expat literature and plain old sybaritism bring them back to Pamplona year after year.

I, too, am a recidivist, though this is only my third time back, which in San Fermín terms means I’m still gumming my rusks. My non-fiesta friends who aren’t appalled by my enthusiasm for “that barbaric spectacle” are simply mystified by it, but that’s on me. Outside July, when I’m pressed to explain myself, I hum and haw. I talk about the trench camaraderie of the run, about how the festival feels like a school reunion – perhaps a reformatory school reunion – except no one had their head flushed down a toilet at the San Fermín Academy for Errant Boys.

All of that is true, but it’s not the whole story. Part of me doesn’t want to expose the magic of fiesta to the chill light of language; and the rest knows it would be futile anyway. The magic can’t be recounted – it has to be felt – and the encierros and corridas are merely the most obvious signs that something other is going on.

That “something” is part religious festival, part celebration of Basque and Navarrese culture, part riotous debauch. For nine sleepless days Pamplona – usually a sedate, provincial city of 200,000 – hosts a Club 18 Months-to-90 holiday for more than a million people. Streets, squares and parks can’t move for concerts, readings, folk dances, puppet shows and Basque rural sports. And threading through it all are the brass bands of the 16 peña social clubs, the fiesta’s roving pulse, charm and, occasionally, menace – cheerfully conscripting passers-by into bacchic service.

AND IT’S ALL FOR one man. Well, for one reputed man, anyway. San Fermín is a saint – a co-patron saint of Navarre, no less – but what we know of his life before canonisation is split between fancy and conjecture.

The story mostly goes that in Roman Pamplona, in the 3rd century, Fermín, a heathen son of a senator, was converted to Christianity by a disciple of Saturninus (later Saint Saturninus), the first bishop of Toulouse. Though local legend insists he was then ordained and returned to Pamplona as its bishop, the Church places him in Amiens, appointed as its bishop and beheaded there for evangelising on 25 September, 303 AD.

The Abbey of Saint-Acheul in Amiens was founded in 1085, and San Fermín’s body is said to have been discovered in a vault beneath its choir. When relics of the saint were delivered to Pamplona in 1196, the city marked the occasion with an annual celebration. It was first held on October 10, but in 1591 the date was shifted to its current July slot to coincide with the livestock fairs.

The sacred and profane – benedictions and bulls – have been bedfellows ever since, though, contrary to popular belief, it was Saturninus, not Fermín, who was tied to a bull’s feet and dragged to his death. And no one knows quite when the saint’s tiny cape, the capotico, acquired its supposed power to protect encierro runners.

ON THE MORNING of July 7, a polychrome wooden effigy of the saint, together with his relics, is carried from his chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo to Pamplona Cathedral. I watch the cortège make its laboriously deliberate way across the Plaza del Consejo, raising perfectly uniform puffs of dust. This is Pamplona in full pomp: the complete set of religious and civic dignitaries in their best bib and tucker; a royal court of papier-mâché giants with their escorts; the municipal brass band and a choral group ready to unleash a jota.

Beside me, a man in his early twenties unwraps a smile as tentative as his moustache, only to withdraw it when our eyes meet. I offer my name and purpose, but he lets the silence stew for a couple of minutes before surrendering his own. All solemnity – and wearing it like an overcoat in a heatwave – he sighs and declares, complete with air quotes: “David Usher, an American Catholic in his third year at the University of Navarra.”

The university where Usher is studying for a doctorate in medicine and health was established by Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic organisation that teaches the secular life can be a path to sanctity. Usher, who admits to being a member, won’t be drawn on depictions of Opus Dei as a secretive group with a taste for medieval self-mortification (notably the cilice, a spiked garter worn around the thigh), but he is “happy” to share his thoughts on Sanfermines.

“It’s a perversion of a religious festival and an affront to good taste. The procession of the saint still moves me, and plenty of others – as it should. Look around: hands on hearts, people crying. But once this is over, Pamplona turns into a den of vice, a place of intoxication, violence and lechery. The streets become rivers of urine and vomit. Tell me, do you come here for that?”

Now, I may not have religion, but I am a great believer in San Fermín, and I’m not alone among the heretic multitudes. Our attachment is worshipful, even if our heaven is vacant.

I first saw the light of fiesta over a bottle of rioja with Larry Belcher, a rodeo rider in Texas turned professor of translation at the University of Valladolid. Belcher has given the whole of his adult life to bulls, books and Spain, and his exuberance is unbroken after 40 years of encierros. He is, for me, Pamplona’s proselytiser-in-chief, and it seems fitting that, with his curtains of white hair, empyrean-blue eyes and highly animated manner, he calls to mind a Dust Bowl preacher. Except that it is always a joy to sit down for one of his sermons.

“To watch Pamplona’s transformation is to witness a marvellous trick. I can’t tell you. This enchanted place seems to materialise out of nowhere, like Brigadoon, and vanish again before the regular world can normalise it. It’s a world unto itself, with its own rules and standards, and it changes everyone who comes near. Hell, it reaches into their souls. A million people each fiesta. Remarkable. Breathtaking. And they keep coming back for that hit of something they can’t find anywhere else.”

Not that you’d get any of that from the press. At best, foreign coverage is luridly cartoonish, painting Pamplona as an open asylum where idiocy and cruelty mingle to the disgust of anyone interested in animal rights. It also tends to report the tramplings, gorings and deaths (there have been 16 fatalities since 1910) with a sniggery relish and an overfondness for the word “karma”.

THE PLAZA DEL CASTILLO, the city’s drawing room, is filling up after the encierro. Families seek coffee and palmeritas in the shade of the arcades. In states of nervous exhaustion, and in clothes that could use a boil-wash, last night’s revellers pass out on the fast-scorching grass. And the runners? They head to a bar. You can pick them out by the minor liberties they take with the dress code: keeping the white trousers, the red pañuelo and the faja sash, they usually switch the white top for a rugby or football shirt – out of superstition, or far more likely, because it makes them easier to spot in the photos of the runs that crowd the souvenir-shop windows.

I stroll to Bar Txoco with a first-timer, a painter and decorator from South Shields built like a caber tosser. Geoff Wanless turned 50 today and the run was his present to himself. When I ask him why, the sound of his voice – a mix of shaken and stirred – is instantly familiar, and laughter bursts out of him whenever it chooses, which is often. Wanless learnt an important lesson this morning: no one is as big as they look. “Why did I do it? It’s hard to remember anything right now. Back home, my standard line was: ‘I’m going to run because I’m having a midlife crisis and can’t afford a Porsche.’”

Looking around, I take a mental register, and within half an hour I’m satisfied that none of my friends is putting the paramedics to work. Cut, yes; bruised, doubtless; but fully anaesthetised by adrenaline and bouncing on their toes, talking at speed and clinking tall glasses of iced cognac and flavoured milk, the traditional post-run tipple – though it packs a punch, it’s more a leveller than a livener, a calm-me-down rather than a pick-me-up.

Pleasantries soon turn to unpleasantries, to the uglier aspects of the morning’s sport; to the strangers who were tossed like salad and had to be stretchered off. There but for the grace of San Fermín go us, eh? Then, with the dangers of our calling safely established, we move on to our own performances, our feats of daring and athleticism. Lacking both in any useful measure, I’m spared the temptation to boast, though I hope my coolness under inquisition sounds a faintly heroic note.

None of us wants a repeat of last year, when “Buffalo” Bill Hillmann, a notable runner who gives beginners “inside track” tours of the course, was gored in the thigh, just shy of his femoral artery.

Hillmann is the last to appear. The 33-year-old Chicagoan, a former Golden Gloves boxing champ, is grinning beneath his trademark duckbill cap like a newsboy who has made the front page of the paper he sells. Beside him, propped against a table, is the stuffed and mounted bust of Brevito, the bull that almost killed him. I’ve heard of matadors decorating their apartments with the heads of their worthier opponents, but never runners.

Hillmann’s relationship with the bulls borders on the devotional, and he has much to thank Brevito for. He wrote his memoir, Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls of Spain, while convalescing from his cornada (horn wound). It’s a story of personal redemption in which he strongly identifies with the suelto, or loose bull, a regular feature of the encierro. When a bull is impeded, distracted or loses its footing, it will almost certainly lose its herding instinct and go rogue.

“Running with the bulls turned my life around. Before I came to Pamplona ten years ago, I was in a gang, dealing drugs. I was totally lost. Like a suelto. Full of fear and rage. Lashing out. Capable of terrible violence. The encierro opened my eyes and gave me focus. A good runner can lead a lost bull back to his herd. I wanted to be that runner — to rescue the bulls that rescued me.

“Brevito had a chance to kill me – it was close – but in a way he handed me my life back. I’ve learnt so much here, in Navarre. Spain is the country of my rebirth.”

Hillmann’s words may sound to general readers like sentimental anthropomorphism at its soggiest, but all the regular runners I know have a profound affection for the bulls. It is no ordinary love that accepts its romance must end in blood, of course, but the connection the mozos feel to these fierce creatures is real – sometimes possessive and, yes, if you wish to scoff, protective too.

They take considerable risks in trying to coax sueltos to follow them to the arena, though it isn’t their job: that falls to the pastores, the shepherds in green polo shirts whose role is to defend – with the same cane – both the bulls from interference and the runners from their own bravado. (And it’s worth noting that, regardless of the carnage they create, the bulls are not tranquilised, there is no escape route for runners and Red Cross volunteers will only treat the badly injured when it’s safe to reach them.)

A Cebada Gago bull, making not so merry. Photograph by Daniel Ochoa De Olza

THESE ANIMALS are more than freakish composites of heft and horns. Fighting bulls are bred like racehorses – for speed, certainly, but also aggression and indomitability. To this end, they are raised wild, from the saddle, in the oak forests and grazing lands of the dehesa in central and southern Spain. Toros de lidia (to give them their official title) must come from ranches with confirmed bloodlines, some going back more than a century. Each ranch prides itself on its encaste, its particular lineage, producing bulls that are not only reliably gifted where it matters but distinguished by quirks of temperament all their own.

From July 7, each day of Sanfermines is run and fought by bulls from a different ranch. To appear in Pamplona – one of just eight First Category bullrings in Spain – they must be between four and six years old and weigh no less than 460kg. Just as aficionados have their favourite encastes to watch in the arena (the word aficionado originally meant a bullfighting enthusiast), I know mozos who pick their mornings to run according to which bulls will be joining them – several even bear tattoos of the hierros, or brands, those bulls carry.

Generally speaking, the clearer and more present the danger they pose, the more popular they are – though “popular” is perhaps the wrong word. Heading a fearsome list, each responsible for a death in the past 35 years, are the bulls of Cebada Gago, from Cádiz, which average almost two gorings per run; the Torrestrellas, which killed an American in horrific fashion in 1995, throwing him 20ft into the air; and the Jandillas, from Extremadura, notorious for tossing their heads and slipping their herds, inviting mayhem – their 2004 encierro resulted in a record eight gorings.

The Miuras, which traditionally run on the final day of fiesta, have their admirers too, though they earned their sobriquet “the bulls of death” in the ring, not on the streets, where they are generally fast, nimble and inclined to stay together. They appeal to the historian and aesthete who room with the class-A bonehead inside most runners. Prehistorically proportioned, with a prominent morillo (the muscle mass over the neck and shoulders), they are the only encaste still carrying a significant amount of Cabrera blood – the Cabrera being one of the founding castes of today’s toros de lidia.

FOREIGNERS STARTED running with the bulls here in small numbers in the early 1950s, and a few of them left more than their signature. Matt Carney’s name, though he died almost 30 years ago, is still regularly invoked, his presence felt as if he’d only just bought you a beer. An Irish-American Marine officer who fought at Iwo Jima and later modelled, acted and wrote, Carney ran with a rare, instinctive facility. Graceful, courageous and full of alegría – the unfettered joy of fiesta – he appears in Iberia, James Michener’s travelogue about Spain, and again in The Drifters, the novelist’s potboiler about Vietnam-era backpackers, which spends a chapter in Pamplona.

Some of Carney’s old cuadrilla – younger than him then, in their seventies now – still return each year, and one, Joe Distler, still runs. A New Yorker who teaches English literature in Paris, the “iron man of Pamplona” has scarcely missed an encierro since 1968.

Carney’s daughter, Deirdre, 37, a teacher and photographer, only took up running recently. Women weren’t permitted to enter the encierro before 1974 and even now make up only a small minority of participants. As there’s little point pretending that machismo isn’t the dominant culture here during San Fermín – the testosterone can leave an acrid taste in the back of my throat – I ask, given a recent spate of sexual assaults, whether Carney fille ever finds the atmosphere simply too toxic for women.

“Look, this is a fiesta for everyone – for families, the elderly, children, mothers. You won’t see such a mix of people at any other festival, and at all hours. I feel incredibly safe here, though I’m older now and no longer in the backstreets at 3am. In the 1990s, when I was 18 to 25, I used to get grabbed a bit, enough that I stopped wearing skirts. Things have improved enormously since then. That’s not to downplay what still happens, but that’s men, not the fiesta.

“People who hate bullfighting will grab anything to bash it with. ‘It encourages primitive behaviour, and what else is primitive? Rape.’ But you’re less likely to be groped here than at a music festival in the States or the UK. This is a family event, not a swarm of young people getting off their faces – which, whatever they protest, is the selling point of Coachella and Glastonbury. And the authorities have listened to campaigners – they’ve increased police presence in the old trouble spots. Few women run, but we’re not secondary characters here – not sidekicks, not accessories to men having their fiesta.”

The Txupinazo opening ceremony, July 6. Photograph by Jordi Cohen Colldeforns

AT THE BREAKFAST tables on Calle de la Merced, I hear someone refer to San Fermín as “Hemingstein” – that is, a monster of Ernest Hemingway’s making. English-language writers and filmmakers have been drawn to the festival ever since Papa chose it as the backdrop for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, but what was once a site of literary pilgrimage has become its own creative industry. Alongside Hillman’s latest book, this year brings the wryly humorous Bulls Before Breakfast by Peter N. Milligan, a Philadelphia lawyer with more than 70 runs behind him, and a feature-length documentary, Chasing Red, by Dennis Clancey, a 32-year-old Iraq infantry veteran who now leads Team Rubicon, a nonprofit specialising in disaster response.

Would Hemingway have approved? Well, one Hemingway does. John, son of Gloria (née Gregory), Ernest’s youngest child, has been attending since 2008. He runs – something his grandfather never did – with a ragtag collective of newcomers and old hands called the Pamplona Posse, the drinking man’s cuadrilla, who were my own introduction to fiesta.

In his memoir Strange Tribe, John writes movingly about his family, its almost imponderable dysfunction in particular, but here he wears the name lightly and is never in a hurry to volunteer it. He felt no blood obligation to turn up to San Fermín – a friend talked him into it – and his attachment to the festival is the same as every other returnee’s.

“It took me a while to adjust to the weight the name has here. When I first came to Pamplona I did a lot of media, and by the end of fiesta people were stopping me everywhere. In Montreal, where I live, the name carries… let’s say, considerably less charge. Things have settled down since that first year, which is good because I just want to enjoy it like anyone else. The camaraderie, the friendships, the atmosphere of a nine-day party that is at once pagan bacchanal and Christian festival – and of course the encierros and the corridas – I love all of it.”

CORRIDAS: THAT’S right, bullfights. Tauromachy isn’t what this piece is about, but it can’t be sidestepped. Anyone who visits Pamplona contributes to it, even if they’re not applauding the matadors, and the runners form a moving cog in the whole enterprise. I’m not about to argue bullfighting’s case, but I’m willing to defend my own.

There is much about the corrida that discomforts me. And much about it that fascinates me. Often they are the same thing. “Bullfight” is a misnomer: the corrida isn’t a fight, unfair or otherwise; it is a dance of death, highly stylised, its steps going back centuries. It offers no apology for what it is and, when poorly mounted – with sloppy bulls and bungling matadors – what it is can be very grisly indeed. Aficionados aren’t in it for the gore. They come for shows of grace, bravery and artistry under siege (every matador is gored once a year on average, and the death toll would be far higher without modern medicine).

Opposition to bullfighting is widespread outside Spain and growing within it (Catalonia banned it in 2010). For the past 14 years, on July 5, the animal-rights group PETA has staged protests in Pamplona to headline-grabbing effect. Their invariably semi-naked displays of outrage have become part of the festival calendar. Depending on the number of breasts on show, locals either shrug, clap from bar doorways or, elbowing past photojournalists, turn the Plaza de Toros into a soft-porn shoot.

An unrepentant propagandist outfit, PETA would have you believe the bulls are routinely nobbled – beaten with bats, doped, their horns shaved, their eyes smeared with vaseline – before they enter the ring, ignoring the fact that spectators can spot a fix with their eyes shut and that there is serious money riding on good, clean contests.

I watch a few of the corridas. The arena, which seats 19,700, is mostly full. The aficionados I’m sat with talk me through the action, though they’re united in wishing there were more of it, and better. A star cast of matadors – Juan José Padilla, El Juli and Miguel Ángel Perera – put in poor performances against below-par beasts. It carries the taint of a blood-spattered circus.

Known affectionately as “the Cyclops of Jerez”, after losing his left eye to a horn that tore it from the socket, Padilla can draw and hold a crowd, but the aficionados want art – vigorous bulls, audacious caping, clinical kills – not a ringmaster.

I talk it over with a friend of Padilla’s, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, an Old Etonian whose own bullfighting apprenticeship formed the basis of his book Into the Arena. Now 39, he saw his first corrida 16 years ago and didn’t fall for it immediately.

“I saw many moments of brutality, but I was surprised to find I could also perceive, intermittently, a kind of beauty that was entirely new to me. Each time I went back thereafter, I went with a little more understanding and a little less aversion. Had I become more sensitive to the aesthetics or more inured to the ethical implications of the fight? I don’t know.”

“Meat-eaters¹ may want to bear in mind that the toro bravo pays for its five years on the ranch with 20 minutes in the ring. The beef cow is put out of its misery after 18 months in a factory farm. And the bulls are eaten. The meat is sold before they enter the ring, which is licensed as an abattoir under European law [bullfighting grew out of the slaughterhouses – the mataderos – of Seville]. But even if that weren’t the case, the argument that killing for food is somehow different from killing for entertainment is bogus. We eat meat because we like the taste – it’s entertainment for our palates.”

As for encierros, they take place all over Navarre (close to 1,500 will be held this year), and Fiske-Harrison, who has stayed trim enough to run in his last school blazer, has tried his legs in the taurine fiestas of Tafalla, Tudela and Falces (where mozos career down a precipitous mountain path that drops sheer on one side); as well as in Cuéllar, in Old Castile, where, in Spain’s oldest documented bull run, toros are herded a little over three miles by some 200 horsemen through pine forest and across stubble fields before they reach town.

“I was watching from the point where the horsemen hand the bulls over to the men on the ground. It was like the cavalry charge scene in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia – this army of horses, their riders carrying lances to protect their mounts, coming down the dusty slope into town alongside a stampeding herd of cattle. As Hemingway said of Pamplona when it still applied, it was ‘the real old stuff’.”

Juan José Padilla, “the Cyclops of Jerez”. Photograph by Jordi Cohen Colldeforns

DAY EIGHT AND it’s my fourth run of the festival. Two days earlier, during my third encierro, the bulls of José Escolar, Pamplona debutants, caused grave disquiet when one of them, the aptly named Curioso, stopped on Santo Domingo, turned around and headed back towards the corral. The mozos were braced for a suelto to come tearing up the street at any moment, but the bull was so agitated it was decided he would take no further part in the morning. With four gorings, the encierro had already been a lively one, so perhaps it was felt the runners had given their pound of flesh.

With only one previous San Fermín to their name, today’s bulls, from the Garcigrande ranch, are no veterans, but a Basque friend who has seen them in the ring tells me they’re not easily distracted.

I’ve avoided calamity so far, but no two runs are the same, even if the “rules” don’t vary much: run fast and true, which means getting in no one’s way, and if you take a tumble, stay down, as flat as you can. You’re unlikely to be scooped up or take a hoof print between the shoulder blades, because bulls – for all they’re happy to impale a vertical runner – have poor vision and are picky about where they put their feet.

I wonder, not for the first time, what I’m trying to prove, and to whom. My first encierro was in 2013, six months after I came out of a coma. Three crackheads had put me there – they were menacing a young woman with a hammer and a plank of wood, and when I intervened they turned the weapons on me. The blows fractured my skull and I was left for dead on the pavement.

True to form – I have a habit of mining humour from calamity – I still find it darkly apt that it happened outside Jack the Clipper, a Whitechapel barbershop that advertises “the closest shave of your life”. When I told my daughters I was going to Pamplona, they joked that multiple bangs to the head had not brought me to my senses. But they were not happy, and neither should they have been.

Fact is, I’ve courted danger since I could tie my own laces – or, preferably, leave them untied. I have a “death wish” every bit as greedy as a Hollywood sex drive. My doctors agree it comes with my “mental health condition”, bipolar 1 disorder. It can present as suicidal, but I’m not. My mania has no interest in my extinction. It simply understands that death’s proximity can sharpen one’s appetite for living.

For what it’s worth, death could not care less about my fourth run, but embarrassment – the death of dignity – sees its chance. The Garcigrandes keep tight to the right on Santo Domingo, horns striking the wall and throwing off the odd spark, and I veer further right still, preparing to meld with the masonry, when I’m abruptly wedged between a heavy-set Frenchman and a cast-iron drainpipe. I feel something pop.

Adrenaline keeps the extent of the damage – two cracked ribs – a secret for a while. Of course, it makes laughter – yawning, coughing, leaning over to type this – a distinctly unfunny business, but as San Fermín sorrows go, it’s the equivalent of denting a bumper in a 2,000-car pile-up.

Regardless, I carry it like a war wound, clutching my chest as though a bullet has just zipped through it. I spend the last day of fiesta not running with the Miuras but eating pintxos, watching swifts perform flights of fancy over the Arga river and drinking patxaran (a sloe-flavoured anisette liqueur I suspect contains traces of fly agaric and H. P. Lovecraft). At the back of my mind is the evening’s closing ceremony in the Plaza del Castillo, where a mournful crowd will raise its pañuelos and sing its farewells to the fiesta and to each other as the sky prepares to fill with fireworks.

THE WEATHER breaks after ten days of swampy humidity as I lug my laundry – like it will ever see white again – to Pamplona bus station. It’s an Old Testament production, the rain coming down like judgement on cobblestones that, when refreshed, reveal the ghost-prints of every bone that has broken against them. Thunder shakes its metal sheet and all the children clap. It sounds like a convoy of bin lorries – or a herd of Jandillas. I turn quickly, hoping to sneak one last look at Brigadoon, but it has already slunk off into the mist, leaving nothing but a whisper on the air: “¡Ya falta menos!”²

Sixty Minutes, Australia, 2013: an interview with Larry Belcher, the very best of men

The header photograph is of my friend Sam Lights on the fourth day of the last Sanfermines I attended, in 2017 (credit: Javier Martínez de la Puente). Few photographs capture the alegría of the encierro quite like this one.

¹ After this piece ran, I received a stack of death threats. These days, in the era of social media and armchair militancy, death threats lack the sting they once had, and I read mine with something like sympathy. I now need evidence of purpose – or at least a decent life – before I tuck into anything that once drew breath, unless I’ve killed it myself. A poacher uncle taught me early on to take the deaths that sustain me very seriously.

I didn’t welcome the threats I received from vegans, but I understood them (though if they stuck religiously to their least-harm principle, in a wider – planetary – context, they’d be too busy killing themselves to kill me). The only creature I harbour any real animus towards is Homo sapiens. Trouble is, it’s illegal to hunt humans and I doubt I’d be able to stomach eating any of the people I’d shoot with an untroubled conscience.

² Meaning “not long now” or “it’s almost here” – it marks the countdown to fiesta.

With just under a year to go before the most ambitious World Cup in history, one question remains uncomfortably open: which teams will make it past the border?

The concern is real. Trump’s travel bans – paired with a second term defined by volatility and open contempt for half the planet – have made entry to the United States less a formality than a geopolitical gamble.

Promises of exemptions for players sound reassuring, right up until the next presidential meltdown. Teams may qualify on the pitch, only to be disqualified at passport control. And for fans, support staff or anyone with the wrong surname, the message is clear: the land of the free is now a gated community.

And then there are the teams who might boycott the tournament altogether...

Football without borders – except these ones

The joint US-Mexico-Canada bid won hosting rights in 2018 on a platform of inclusivity. Chief among its pledges was the promise of “non-discriminatory entry” for players, officials and fans – a line that ticked a very important FIFA box. Seven years on, however, the political weather has curdled. Armoured vehicles now roll through American cities like it’s Baghdad in 2004, not Los Angeles in 2025.

Trump’s return to office has revived his signature travel ban – this time expanded to 19 countries, with 12 facing a full entry prohibition and seven more subject to restricted visa categories. The fallout is already visible: visa backlogs are choking consulates, leaving thousands of tourist applications in bureaucratic purgatory, where paperwork goes to die.

For countries that have already qualified – like Iran – or are likely to qualify from those now blacklisted or tightly scrutinised – Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Libya, Somalia – the dilemma is obvious. The ban includes exemptions for “any athlete or member of an athletic team, including coaches, support staff and immediate relatives”, but that’s a technicality, not a guarantee. The real question is: what happens if fans can’t get in? Or worse, if the bloviator-in-chief simply changes his mind. Given Trump’s track record for diplomacy by tantrum and policy by grudge, no one’s banking on stability.

Proposals to shift US-hosted matches to Canada or Mexico – if visa access can’t be guaranteed – are quietly gaining traction. But the logistics are brutal. Concacaf officials privately admit that such a move would require FIFA to invoke its “force majeure” clause, a legal grenade with massive financial fallout. It would also be unprecedented without the host nation withdrawing or defaulting. If anything, the speculation has tilted the other way: should tensions escalate, insiders say Canada or Mexico might walk – and, as former US Soccer president Alan Rothenberg put it, America “would pick up the games in a heartbeat”.

When the stands are empty, don’t blame the fans

Human rights groups warn that the cup is heading straight into the hands of the most restrictive host regime in the tournament’s history. Under Trump’s travel bans, the US has created what Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls “a hostile environment” for players, fans and journalists – a stage dressed for unity, surrounded by barricades.

Visa hurdles have multiplied. Applicants must now declare sex assigned at birth, a requirement HRW says erases trans and non-binary identities. At the border, even ticket-holders risk phone searches, interrogation and being detained if their social feeds criticise Trump. Pro-Palestinian activists have already had visas revoked.
Vice-President JD Vance, never one to miss a cue, has warned that anyone overstaying “will have to talk to Homeland Security”.

Andrea Florence of the Sport & Rights Alliance put it plainly: “Despite FIFA’s mantra that ‘football unites the world’, a World Cup held under discriminatory and exclusionary policies risks deepening social divides rather than bridging them.” She urged FIFA to demand binding legal guarantees that human rights won’t be sacrificed to keep the show on the road.

Amnesty International has gone further, stating that the Trump administration’s repression of migrants and free expression “poses immediate risks to the tournament’s legitimacy”. It’s demanding an independent audit of US entry procedures by November, just three months before final team workshops are set to begin.

International arrivals to the US are already down 12% since 2023. So much for the promised 3.7 million foreign spectators. For a tournament built on the fantasy of openness, the exclusions are starting to look like the point.

What price the beautiful game?

The World Cup was already limping toward farce, hobbled by the sight of FIFA president Gianni Infantino playing valet to Donald Trump.

In March, Trump unveiled a White House “Task Force for the World Cup”, with Infantino beside him, grinning like a goon. What was sold as a jobs-and-tourism push quickly mutated into a nationalist vanity project, with side-swipes at Canada and Mexico and economic forecasts best filed under fiction. Infantino gamely repeated the numbers – a $40 billion boost and 200,000 jobs – then disappeared into the wallpaper when asked about visas and civil liberties.

By May, the pantomime had gone fully global. Infantino skipped FIFA Congress to trail Trump through Qatar and Saudi Arabia, two regimes that treat sport as air freshener for state violence. UEFA delegates walked out. One accused him, accurately, of “turning FIFA into a political vehicle”.

The alliance has stripped FIFA’s official stance – neutral, apolitical, global – of its last pretence. What’s left is a governing body more comfortable with autocrats than accountability. Infantino now faces a choice he’s shown no appetite for: defend the principle of access or let a host nation’s politics redraw the boundaries of the global game.

As Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch put it, “Infantino’s legacy will be judged by whether he sides with human dignity or political opportunism.” At present, it’s not even close.

For millions of fans, this isn’t just about football. It’s about whether the world’s biggest stage still belongs to the world or whether it’s just another tool for strongmen to dictate the guest list.

Countdown to kick-off

In July, FIFA’s technical inspection team is set to release its venue-compliance report. If the visa issue remains unresolved, it may issue only conditional approvals for certain US stadiums.

By autumn, Washington is expected to roll out an “event-specific visa programme”. If the scheme exempts players and staff but leaves ordinary fans out in the cold, expect formal petitions to move matches out of the United States – not that anyone in power seems eager to blink first.

Then comes January 2026 and the final security and travel summit in Zurich, the last exit ramp for any federation weighing a boycott without triggering legal and financial blowback. After that, the costs rise, the optics sour and the window to salvage FIFA’s already precarious credibility begins to slam shut.

This weekend, in a flex of federal muscle that would make a junta blush, the White House sent 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles and placed active-duty Marines on high alert. Their target? Anti-ICE riots that administration hardliners – with considerable gall – have branded an “insurrection”.

The move, made without the involvement of California governor Gavin Newsom, signalled a sharp escalation in the federal response to domestic unrest, smudging the line between civil policing and military force in ways not seen in a generation.

What began on Friday as protests against ICE raids on “businesses suspected of unlawfully employing illegal aliens” rapidly intensified into a show of militarised strength, intent on crowd dispersal. The LAPD lobbed flash-bang grenades and tear gas and fired volleys of so-called “less lethal” munitions – rubber bullets and pepper balls – striking not only demonstrators but journalists clearly marked as press.

With Homeland Security hawk Stephen Miller calling for daily ICE arrest quotas to be tripled to 3,000 – for volume to be prioritised over criminal history – and threatening to sack department heads who refuse or fall short, ICE agents are moving with the swagger of men whose badges seem laminated with impunity.

California leaders have accused the Trump administration of staging a “purposefully inflammatory” performance – political theatre in combat gear at the expense of immigrant communities. The arrest on Friday of David Huerta, president of SEIU California – the state’s largest union and a vital voice for immigrant labourers –became a flashpoint, igniting protests of its own. Huerta had been present as a community observer when he was violently detained by federal agents, sustaining injuries that required hospitalisation. Released on a $50,000 bond, he now faces felony charges carrying up to six years in prison.

That Trump let the Capitol fall, the National Guard left idle despite every reason to act, is more than chilling. It is damning. Five dead, dozens injured, police bludgeoned with flagpoles, lawmakers fleeing, the foundation of democracy quaking, in a spectacle broadcast live to the world – and none of it moved him. Instead, the commander‑in‑chief sat transfixed, as if watching a private screening of his own violent fantasy. That wasn’t a dereliction of duty, but a deranged abdication – the president chose the insurgents over the Constitution.

That was a real insurrection, but he treated it like a fireworks display in his honour. And when he returned to office, he pardoned more than 1,500 of the agitators, including men convicted of rape, manslaughter and domestic violence. The message couldn’t have been clearer: if the mob chants his name, their record doesn’t matter – they’re family.

The pardon absolved them of both consequence and cost – no time to serve, no restitution to pay – leaving the public to swallow the $2.7 billion bill for their wreckage. January 6 didn’t break America, but it revealed its going rate.

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War baby

ICE was born on March 1, 2003 – a post-9/11 creation intended to consolidate immigration and customs enforcement under the banner of national security. But what started as a bureaucratic reshuffle has since metastasised into something closer to a rogue paramilitary unit, armed with wartime tools to be unleashed on peacetime targets.

From the outset, ICE operated with a siege mentality – stoked by rhetoric about “internal enemies” and the deep-rooted habit of conflating immigration with terrorism. Agents once tasked with deporting visa overstays and undocumented entrants were soon recast as front-line soldiers in a civil war narrative.

By FY2024, Congress appropriated approximately $3.43 billion solely for immigration detention facilities, while the entire US immigration court system received just $840 million, and US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ refugee and asylum division got $424 million.

That’s because ICE has become an incarcerate‑first, adjudicate‑later – if at all –operation, upheld by a vast surveillance dragnet and a willingness to stretch legal boundaries. With about 51,300 individuals in ICE custody as of June 1, 2025, and nearly 44% of them having no criminal record beyond immigration violations, it’s clear that enforcement is sweeping, indiscriminate and preemptive.

At the same time, millions more individuals appear on non-detained dockets – such as Alternatives to Detention programmes. In FY 2024, nearly 1.8 million new immigration cases were filed and around 3.7 million remain pending, highlighting how seldom cases are adjudicated. Many of these releasees are being monitored via GPS ankle bracelets or app-based check-ins like SmartLINK, but almost all remain under ICE jurisdiction, even if they never enter a detention centre.

Even under a Democratic president, the enforcement machine kept whirring. Barack Obama spoke the language of reform but was dubbed the “Deporter‑in‑Chief” after removing over two million people, more than any other president to date. His administration claimed to focus oncriminals and recent border crossers, the reality on the ground told a different story: families were separated, detention centres overflowed and ICE agents went rogue.

In 2012, Obama launched DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) to protect young undocumented arrivals, and in 2014 he introduced DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans) to defer deportation for parents of US citizens or lawful residents. Both were executive actions that bypassed Congress – and prompted ICE agents to sue, claiming the directives forced them to break the law. That exposed ICE as an agency that saw itself as autonomous, not answerable to elected leadership.

Trump has scrapped Obama’s modest guardrails, shuttered three Homeland Security watchdog offices, and supercharged ICE’s mandate. Arrests that defy common decency – and at times violate policy – have become routine. Homeland Security also rescinded Biden-era guidance barring ICE from making arrests at schools, hospitals, churches, courthouses and other sensitive locations, declaring instead that agents could rely on their “common sense”.

By mid‑2025, ICE’s resurgence under Trump was undeniable: over 100,000 arrests to date – an average of nearly 800 daily, significantly up from prior years. From late January through early May, the agency carried out around 72,200 removals. Meanwhile, US detention centres are packed beyond capacity – about 12,000 people over the funded cap of 41,500 beds – as detainees endure, at best, primitive conditions: sleeping on floors, facing limited access to food and showers, and suffering chronic medical neglect.

And then there are the missing. In March, ICE conducted a “enhanced enforcement operation” across Albuquerque, Santa Fe,and Roswell, arresting 48 New Mexico residents – and then went dark. The agency has refused to disclose who was taken, where they’re being held or whether they have access to legal counsel. The ACLU has called this pattern of silence an “enforced disappearance” – language typically reserved for authoritarian states, not constitutional democracies.

A user’s guide to unchecked power

If current trends are alarming, the future envisioned by Project 2025 is downright apocalyptic. Drafted by the Heritage Foundation and backed by a cadre of Trump loyalists, the plan reads less like policy than ideology – a hard-right manifesto calling for the dismantling of civil rights protections and the transfer of near-total authority to ICE and its sister agencies.

In immigration terms, it proposes turning ICE into “a nationwide deportation machine”. The plan calls for expanding expedited removal – a fast-track process with no judge, no legal counsel, and minimal review – to cover the entire country. What is currently limited to recent arrivals near the border would become a licence for ICE to carry out on-the-spot deportations anywhere in America.

The plan also pushes for full militarisation of the border – troops, tactical hardware and legal mechanisms to shut down asylum entirely. The result, experts warn, would be a humanitarian crisis: refugee camps trapped in legal limbo and armed forces turned inward against civilians.

It goes further. Project 2025 would double ICE’s detention capacity to 100,000 beds, impose mandatory detention on wide swathes of immigrants, and deputise local police as immigration enforcers. Cities that refuse to cooperate would face federal punishment. Civil rights groups call it what it is: an authoritarian wet dream – stripping away judicial oversight, centralising executive power and criminalising mere presence.

This isn’t some dystopian leap – it’s merely formalising what many immigrants already live: the raids, the disappearances, the plain-clothes arrests, the masked agents. Project 2025 didn’t invent these tactics. It simply made them official – not just tolerated, but openly endorsed.

Trump may once have dismissed parts of Project 2025 as “abysmal”, but his actions speak louder. His second-term team is stacked with its architects: Stephen Miller as Deputy Chief of Staff for policy and homeland security, Russell Vought heading the Office of Management and Budget, and Tom Homan overseeing border enforcement. The blueprint is no longer theoretical – it’s the scaffolding of governance.

The belly of the beast

People don’t want to hear it, but none of this is spontaneous – or new. It feeds a ravenous leviathan five decades in the making: the prison-industrial complex. This industry locks up more people per capita than almost any nation on Earth – for profit. Private prison companies alone rake in over $5 billion a year, while the broader prison economy is worth $80 billion annually – more than the GDP of several sovereign states.

Just as ICE’s abuses didn’t begin with Trump, neither did the machinery behind them – and it’s been a bipartisan project from the start. From Nixon’s war on drugs and Reagan’s mandatory minimums to Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill (penned in part by Joe Biden), both parties helped build the monster: a private state that converts mass incarceration into political capital and economic gain.

The result is an extraction economy that treats human beings as inventory. A system that disproportionately targets black and brown communities through aggressive policing and rigged sentencing; that criminalises poverty through cash bail, fines and fees, trapping the poorest in a revolving door of debt and detention; and that runs on coerced labour, paying cents on the hour under the 13th Amendment’s loophole for slavery – a constitutional carve-out that makes bondage legal, so long as it’s inside a prison.

Private prison lobbies continue to grease the wheels of “justice”, pouring at least $26.2 million into campaigns across 16 states since 2012, with CoreCivic and GEO Group leading the chicanery. Shielded from donor scrutiny, dark-money networks bankroll xenophobia, laundering social control as public safety through fear-mongering ads, ghostwritten op-eds and a steady pipeline of “tough-on-crime” candidates up and down the ballot. Glittering political careers – on both sides of the aisle – have been built on bodies behind bars.

Detention span

While offshore detention isn’t new, under Trump it has become systematic – a full-scale extension of America’s carceral apparatus, brokered through hush-hush agreements and poised to become a permanent fixture of his second term.

Dozens of deportees – and ICE officers – are now crammed into converted shipping-container “living quarters” at Camp Lemonnier, a US Navy base in Djibouti, on the northeast coast of Africa. They’re enduring daytime temperatures above 100F, toxic smog from nearby burn pits and the looming threat of Houthi rocket attacks launched from across the Red Sea in Yemen.

In March, 238 Venezuelans – many with no criminal records – were deported to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, an archaic 1798 law that allows the US government to bypass judicial review, due process, even basic notification. They now languish in CECOT, a 40,000-bed maximum-security prison built under a state of emergency and notorious for extreme overcrowding, prolonged isolation and brutal conditions. Human rights groups have dubbed it a “black hole” – a legal and moral abyss where people vanish, stripped of rights, representation and visibility.

Guantánamo Bay is being repurposed as a de facto offshore prison for asylum-seekers – Trump has ordered preparations to hold up to 30,000 migrants. In February, 178 Venezuelans – mostly with no criminal charges, no hearings, no right of appeal – were herded into Camp 6, a facility once reserved for terror suspects, where sleep deprivation and psychological torment were standard practice.

Similar detention sites have been established or expanded in Panama, Costa Rica and beyond – remote compounds in jungle terrain where detainees, including children, are warehoused in converted factories, parted from their phones, their passports and their rights. This is not border enforcement. It’s outsourced sadism, sanitised by distance and deniability.

Offshore detention is here to stay. What began as improvisation – a legal grey zone to buy time or dodge accountability – has hardened into a parallel system of confinement. Facilities like Camp Lemonnier and Guantánamo are no longer outliers; they’re templates. And in Trump’s second term, their expansion won’t be incidental – it will be foundational. More shipping containers. More proxy prisons. More black-site bargains with foreign regimes willing to disappear people on America’s behalf. The legal rationale is being retrofitted. And the moral cost, as ever, will be borne by the nameless and displaced – far from the cameras, and further still from justice.

With barely two minutes of regular time left, the stadium had slipped into a hush – not tense; flat. The home side were a goal behind, and their fans had all but abandoned hope of them drawing level; their performance having been more torpid than dogged.

But seconds later it took only a jinky run down the right, a decisive cross and a clean, emphatic finish for the terraces to go spare. Flags written off as tat moments earlier were suddenly unfurled in a delirium of national pride, and the roar left my eardrums quaking. The trailing side had levelled, forcing a penalty shootout.

They went on to win, but it’s that comeback strike that’ll stay with me – or more precisely, the sound of air rushing back into five thousand pairs of moping lungs. Like resurrection, but louder.

So far, so football, eh? Well, maybe – but this was no ordinary game of two halves. It was a World Cup final. And not just any World Cup. Global in reach, yes. A magnet for talent, certainly. But otherwise, nothing like it. Because the CONIFA World Cup is for a different kind of player – stateless, exiled, displaced – and a different kind of team. It’s the World Cup for countries that don’t exist.

Let me explain…

The CONIFA World Football Cup is an international tournament run by the Confederation of Independent Football Associations. Its qualifying teams lie outside FIFA’s orbit and represent places and communities often left off the map – de facto states, disputed territories, autonomous regions, linguistic and ethnic minorities, stateless peoples and historical or cultural polities.

As of 2025, CONIFA lists more than 40 members, among them Padania (northern Italy); Artsakh (Nagorno‑Karabakh); Kernow (Cornwall); Tamil Eelam (the Tamil diaspora); Cascadia (a cross‑border U.S.–Canada bioregion); Katanga (a secessionist movement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo); and Kabylia (the Berbers of north Algeria).

CONIFA insists its mission is to build bridges through football “beyond politics”.¹ But critics counter that the federation’s showcase events have featured or been hosted by contested, often Russia-backed breakaway territories – South Ossetia (champions of the 2019 European Football Cup held in Artsakh), the Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics” (drawn for the 2019 tournament before later withdrawals) and Transnistria (a past CONIFA member) – thereby granting precisely the visibility such entities seek.

On this reading, the bridge-building claim shades into sportswashing – a soft-power cover for separatism, according to some analysts. In short, CONIFA presents itself as neutral; its critics call that stance naïve at best, complicit at worst.

Pointedly enough, it was Abkhazia I saw lift the cup in June 2016 in Sukhumi, its capital, beating Panjab, the UK‑based Punjabi diaspora side. A former autonomous republic within Soviet Georgia, Abkhazia fought a 1992–93 war with Georgia and adopted an Act of State Independence in October 1999.

Today only five UN member states – Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru and Syria – recognise it. Others treat it as Georgian territory under Russian occupation. The economy runs on the Russian ruble, many residents hold Russian passports and Abkhaz forces in the war received significant backing from North Caucasus and Cossack volunteers alongside Russian support.

The Russians had always coveted Abkhazia. A subtropical strip of forested coast on the Black Sea’s eastern edge, it was once the Soviet Riviera, when Politburo grandees dotted the hills with dachas and basked like elephant seals on the shingle. Stalin kept multiple retreats there. Lavrentiy Beria – Stalin’s secret police supremo, born within earshot of Sukhumi – favoured it too, even as he presided over the Great Terror of the late Thirties, which liquidated the Abkhaz creative and scientific intelligentsia.

When I was there, Sukhumi looked like a place taking a slow constitutional after a long illness. It limped like a veteran, and no one needed telling where all the holes had come from. During the tournament it mustered a modest flicker of vitality: backgammon players cupped their hands around small glasses of Turkish-strong coffee; anglers cast for horse mackerel from derelict jetties; and passers‑by lifted their heads to the scent of osmanthus blossoms on the salt‑sprinkled breeze.

The 2020 CONIFA World Football Cup was moved to Skopje, North Macedonia, after the self-declared republic of Somaliland pulled out for “logistical” reasons. Given the former’s recent political history, the relocation did little to dampen criticism of the federation’s “beyond politics” stance.

North Macedonia adopted its name in February 2019 under the UN-brokered Prespa Agreement with Greece, which had opposed its neighbour’s unqualified use of “Macedonia” since the early Nineties, arguing it implied claims on Greece’s own Macedonia region. The deal opened the door for North Macedonia to join NATO in March 2020 and finally begin EU accession talks.

Greece wasn’t being precious. A decade ago, Macedonia’s corrupt, ethnonationalist VMRO-DPMNE government² embarked on a makeover of its capital. Branded “Skopje 2014”, it offered a radical reframing of national history, tying modern Macedonians to the ancient kingdom of Macedon and the bloodline of Philip II and Alexander the Great.

The project spilled onto the streets – “antiquising”, as its champions styled it – turning the centre into an unmatched aesthetic disaster: a pavilion, a National Theatre, new government façades, two ornate pedestrian bridges, a clutch of museums and hundreds of statues, all in counterfeit neoclassicism.

Miroslav Grčeva, designer of the North Macedonian flag and now a professor of urban planning in Skopje, put it bluntly: “It’s a crime against public space, culture, urbanism and art – against the city and the citizen. I hang my head.”

At the heart of the development stands a 75-foot pillar topped by a giant Alexander the Great on a rearing Bucephalus, encircled by a dancing fountain and warriors in Hoplite helmets fending off lions. Close by, outsized monuments to Philip II, Justinian I and Tsar Samuil crowd the skyline. And then there’s the Porta Macedonia triumphal arch, carrying a cheery message from Skopje’s most famous daughter, Mother Teresa: “The greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

The words “bodge job” kept returning to me as I toured the city four years ago. The statuary is misshapen and crudely cast. Fountains are pitted and rusting. Marble façades read as styrofoam at ten paces, while the rear elevations are wrecks. The overall effect is of a landing pad for a Hellenic spaceship piloted by Walt Disney – a pastiche of Ancient Greece rather than a homage. And that’s if you don’t look too closely.

It’s culturally appropriative in the extreme – criminally kitsch on an industrial scale, and packed so tightly you can’t admire one colossus without tripping over the next. But the real obscenity is that an ideology-drunk ruling party saddled one of Europe’s poorest states with a £650 million tab for the spectacle.

A natural disaster drove Skopje’s first great transformation. In 1963 a 6.1‑magnitude earthquake destroyed roughly four‑fifths of the city. The UN then coordinated an international rebuild, and in 1965 a team led by Japan’s Kenzō Tange – of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park fame – won the competition for a new city‑centre master plan. The sculptural modernism that followed has since been neglected or reskinned with hollow Doric colonnades to suit the city’s new faux‑classical look.

Before its antiquisation, Skopje drew travellers to its Ottoman quarter on the eastern bank of the Vardar, under Kale Fortress, with its bezisten (covered market), caravanserais and mosques. It’s still there, derided as “Little Tirana” by nationalists yet protected as cultural heritage. In a city refaced in plaster fantasy, it’s the one part of it you can trust with your eyes.

¹ CONIFA president Per-Anders Blind insists the tournament transcends politics: “Everyone has the right to exist on their own terms, to choose their tribe. Many have been persecuted. CONIFA helps them take pride in who they are.” For Blind, it’s personal. A member of the Sami people, the son of a reindeer herder in the mountains of Sweden and Norway. “We were discriminated against too,” he says. “Now we have a team of our own [FA Sápmi].”

² Elections in 2024 returned VMRO-DPMNE to power (Hristijan Mickoski as PM) and the new president, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, immediately rattled Athens by omitting “North” during her swearing-in. In January, a Skopje court overturned the 2021 convictions of four former officials over the 2017 storming of parliament – when some 200 nationalists broke in after the election of Talat Xhaferi, an ethnic Albanian, as Speaker – citing a 2018 amnesty law, a move critics said deepened fears of impunity.

SPRAWLING ACROSS the Mexican border state of Sonora, El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve is one of the hottest, driest places on Earth – and it’s vast, “visible from space” vast. Yet UNESCO granted it World Heritage status not for its size but for its mystery – that elusive thing it calls “Outstanding Universal Value”. A fitting accolade for an area whose pleasures are otherworldly.

Its claim to that value rests, partly if improbably, on the profusion of life it sustains. It’s an archive of adaptation: 44 mammals, more than 200 birds, 40 reptiles, a smattering of amphibians and – absurdly – two species of freshwater fish. Here, existence is a negotiation. Life moves with deliberate economy, wasting nothing.

A reserve of two parts – a dormant volcanic field in the east and, in the west, a desert of shifting dunes – El Pinacate harbours the Gila monster, desert bighorn sheep and Sonoran pronghorn among stands of barrel, cholla, organ pipe and saguaro cacti. Elsewhere, mesquite, brittlebush, creosote, ironwood and thornapple notate the landscape – their names a kind of Shipping Forecast for fans of Louis L’Amour.

Most years the desert honours its vow of abstinence, parched and withholding. Vegetation gets by on less than 15 per cent of the land. But when El Niño stirs the Pacific and Sonora gets a proper soaking, all bets are off. Erupting from the dust in a single exhalation, burnt-orange chuparosa, white oenothera, blue lupin and violet verbena transform El Pinacate¹ into a magic carpet of flowers.

I FIRST GOT TO know the reserve in 2013. I was in Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, reporting on the drug war, a story I’d covered, off and on, for years, usually with the grim sense that the plot had been written by men with no interest in character development. After a run-in with cartel muscle, I decided to excuse myself from the low-rent thriller my life had become: the lead was expendable, the projector stuttering and the ending unlikely to improve with further viewing. So I borrowed a friend’s truck and drove south to Puerto Peñasco, on the northern lip of the Sea of Cortez. From there, it was just half an hour to El Pinacate.

It was summer, and the living felt illicitly easy. I rented a sun-bleached room in an apartment block near the beach. The fishing was plentiful – red snapper, bonito, calico bass – enough to keep me fed and the neighbours friendly. As for the water itself, Google calls it the Gulf of California, but I had known it as the Sea of Cortez since I was 12, when I read, spellbound, John Steinbeck’s account of exploring its waters aboard a sardine seiner. Some names stay because they became part of the first map you made of yourself.

Still, I can’t help but despair at what commercial fishing – and the development that trails behind it like a slick – has done to “the world’s aquarium”, to borrow a phrase from the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. The Sea, once a riot of life, now tallies more losses than gains. Gillnets used to catch totoaba – a hulking member of the drum family prized in China for its swim bladder – have been banned, but the prohibition arrived like most modern mercies: almost certainly too late.

In August, the International Whaling Commission issued its first “extinction alert” – a last flare – for the vaquita, the world’s most endangered marine mammal. The smallest cetacean on earth, it is now confined to the shallow waters of the Colorado River Delta. Perhaps ten are left, down from about 600 in 1997

In August, the International Whaling Commission issued its first “extinction alert” – a last flare – for the vaquita, the world’s most endangered marine mammal. This diminutive porpoise, smallest of all cetaceans, survives only in the shallow waters of the Colorado River Delta. Perhaps ten remain, down from about 600 in 1997. There is a terrible wonder in seeing one: it breaks the surface, breathes and goes on being itself, while we stand there pretending this is not on us.

EL PINACATE possessed me. I’d meant to stay a week – no more – yet a month slipped past before I so much as checked a calendar. Time went slack in the heat, like rope. But even as the desert climbed into the high forties and the sea air hung heavy as a laundry’s, I barely broke a sweat.

I camped out for a couple of days at a time, snacking on Fig Newtons and beef jerky, watching the sky darken until its diamonds shook loose. A CD of Calexico’s Feast of Wire saw in my nights, the borderline between America and Mexico, not yet fortified, running through its fusion of parched blues, roadside jazz and exhausted mariarchi horns. A ferruginous pygmy owl kept time with high, squelchy, rapid-fire toots.

My dreams were distillations of the reserve: the senses scrambled, ears seeing, eyes hearing, and long trails of perfectly printed animal tracks crossing the dark before vanishing mid-stride, as if the animal had stepped through a rip in the world and left me on the wrong side of it. There were bats, too – long-nosed bats – feeding on night-blooming cacti, their faces and bibs furred with pollen. When I woke, it was to the taste of bacanora, mezcal’s Sonoran cousin, made from Agave angustifolia. I would return to El Pinacate just to dream like that again.

Each visit to the reserve felt like my first. The map in my head couldn’t contain it – and disintegrated with each unfolding. Landmarks shifted as if moved in the night by a celestial scenery wagon: cinder cones and lava tubes; erg dunes, linear, domed or star‑shaped, some rising to 250 metres; granite outcrops forming their own sierra half a mile above the desert floor; and craters – perfectly circular, a mile across and canyon‑deep – born of steam explosions with the force of atom bombs. And, seemingly, it was all at the mercy of levers, buttons and whim.

And yet, for all its grandeur – and El Pinacate is a place where even God might pause to worship – it wasn’t the landscape that stayed with me longest. It was a story from 54 years earlier.

ONE MORNING over coffee in Peñasco, I mentioned to a neighbour – a softly spoken man in his seventies – that I had heard astronauts once trained in the reserve, though I had assumed it was folklore: the desert flattering its resemblance to the moon. Gus smiled, benign as a pane of cool, clear glass. Then, slowly, as if performing a rite, eased a photograph from his large wallet. Watching my face, he passed it to me.

As I studied it, he said: “An American businessman – a hotelier and horse breeder – threw a party here, at his house, in January 1969. He asked if I’d play with the band he’d booked, so I brought my cornet along. Everyone was excited, though I didn’t know why. I didn’t know who the men were. They were friendly, they tipped us well, and that was all that mattered to me at the time.”

He paused, as though summoning nerve, then said, with inordinate care, his eyes wide and wet: “Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.”

And there they were. Apollo 11, pre-mission. Faded, creased, but unmistakable – smiling up at me in their civvies, holding cocktails like tiki bar regulars, a few months before the world would learn their names forever. No spacesuits. No flag. It was as if history had been caught washing its hands in a truck-stop sink.

I asked if I could take a photo of his icon, but Gus shook his head, still smiling, and gently plucked it from my fingers, tweezer-style. The “three amiable strangers” – as Collins himself once called them – returned to their rightful home. Gus placed the wallet on the table between us. I swear, for a moment then, it glowed.

¹ It takes its name from the Mexican-Spanish word – via Nahuatl – for a species of endemic stink beetle, which, when distressed, performs a headstand and emits a foul-smelling fluid.

Below, Sunken Waltz, the opening track on Calexico’s Feast of Wire

St John Street, Finsbury. 5am. Not quite first light – more like third. The crack of dawn with a bit of thigh and midriff showing. It’s not unusual for me to be up at this hour, though it’s rare I’ve slept first.

Like most night owls, I don’t take kindly to mornings. But today, I’m beaming. I’m heading to Smithfield, where – so I’m told – you can still enjoy that rare liberty: a pub crawl before the rest of London’s had its first flat white. The aim is to raise my first glass at six and my last just shy of eleven, at which point I will call it a… day.

Why? Because getting a proper drink within Zone 3 is almost impossible. And by “proper” I don’t mean a lean Patagonian malbec or a dunkelweizen that tastes of cloves and bananas – we’re drowning in those. The drink’s incidental. It’s about company: talking to strangers, the kind with jobs that don’t need explaining. I’m not looking to decompress with a head of customer acquisition. Call me a throwback – even a tragic one with a Happy Families fixation – I can live with that.

The gastrofication of the capital’s pubs hasn’t helped. Once, the bar was the main stage for the performance of public life. If you were new in town, you planted yourself there and let staff and regulars tell you what’s what. Tables were for rowing couples and sulking kids. They were culturally void. Now the centre has shifted and the conversation with it.

Bar stools have largely vanished and service has turned pissy-stilted in the middling restaurant manner. It suits the new breed of London drinker – that is, the anti-drinker – the middle-class Brit whose fetish for personal space affronts the very idea of a public house. The MCB loves a table, a little castle moated against pesky strangers. They would drink alone in a DFS showroom if it meant no one asking them what they were reading.

At a little past five-thirty, the Hope on Cowcross Street begins to stir. Lights come on, then dim, as if thinking better of it. The boozer, a bow-fronted Victorian rebuild of a pub first licensed in 1790, sits side-on to the central arcade that splits the twin halls of Smithfield Market – the largest meat market in Europe.

Built in 1868 on a site where beasts were first bartered in the 10th century, this Grade II-listed wrought-iron wonder opens from two till eight on weekday mornings. Those hours once justified early licences for the surrounding pubs – to serve butchers, packers and porters – though only a handful still make use of them.

There’s a man crouched at the Hope’s door, forehead bulging with concentration. He appears to be trying to pick the lock with his mind. I park myself at the picnic table beside him, the better to hear the tumblers fall.

He looks up, frowning – because he’s no fucking sideshow – but joins me anyway. “Gary,” he says, offering a hand, which – trembling badly, seemingly in the grip of multiple withdrawals – he quickly retracts. He tells me he was a “shop boy” at the market when he was 17, which, in his cosmology, means “basically we’re sitting in my front room”.

He confides in a bad-news voice that he’s been up all night and fancied “a change of scene, some civilisation”. At which point, the door opens. He smiles, puts a finger to his lips – in case I’m tempted to out him as telekinetic – and, practically hand in hand, we embrace the Hope and enter there.

It’s dark. So dark it’s clotted in places, with shadows lying in jumble-sale heaps. Womb-like, if you allow that not all pregnancies go well. We take up positions at the bar. Gary goes quiet, his Cockney growl idling, and it takes a pint of dishwater Kronenbourg to unglue his lips. “I’ll warm up after a couple,” he says, eyeing his empty. I buy his second. “Cheers. I like drinking from a glass I don’t have to wash up. And two beers in here beats a four-pack in the park.”

At about six-thirty the pub fills. A dozen Crossrail workers: one local boy, half a dozen northerners, a Glaswegian, three Poles and a Hungarian. Their specialty: reinforced concrete. Half of them are knocking off, and the others are clocking on, though it’s hard to tell them apart since they’re all drinking. Which is why they want the camera pointed elsewhere. “If it helps, you can take the back of my head,” the Glaswegian offers, winking at his workmates. I respond in camp delight: “A subject who knows their best side is a photographer’s dream.”

Crossrail arrives in 2018. Farringdon’s getting dressed up to be the capital’s next great interchange – Underground, Thameslink, Crossrail – a magic portal to Gatwick, Heathrow and Luton. Developers are creaming themselves. The future’s almost here. The present’s been told to make itself scarce.

“Serious money’s moving in already. And the people who’ve got it don’t want drunks singing in the street at 7am – even if those drunks have just come off an eight-hour shift,” says Colm, 29, an outreach worker with the homeless charity St Mungo’s. He’s dropped in for a whisky – “That’s one whisky, boss” – after a ten-hour sweep of rough sleepers’ usual haunts.

“Homelessness, especially round here, with City money breathing down everyone’s neck, is as bad as I’ve seen it. Rents are mad. Affordable housing’s a joke. A lot of the old boys would rather kip rough somewhere familiar than be shipped out to some shiny new box on the edge of nowhere. I see what happens when people lose their homes. Every day. But I see what happens because of this, too.” He raises his tumbler and grimaces.

While long-time residents are being swept aside – priced out, evicted – others are being wooed with concierge smiles. These settlers tick every box: upwardly mobile, aesthetically neutral and they have no problem paying £7 for a pint they’ll never finish. Smithfield isn’t regenerating – it’s being occupied.

Last year, despite objections from both Islington and Camden councils, Boris Johnson gave the go-ahead to the newly privatised Royal Mail’s plan for a 681-unit luxury scheme on the Mount Pleasant sorting office site. A quarter of those units were trumpeted as “affordable”, which in the semantic landfill of modern planning jargon means rents capped at 80 per cent of the local market rate. In this neighbourhood, that puts them beyond the reach of anyone not making partner.

Money doesn’t give a fuck about community, culture or continuity. It wants yield. And this polite little programme of “social cleansing” is what you get when capital is handed the keys to a city. My only hope for the cultural survival of central London is a market crash big enough to scare off the speculators. Or – slimmer chance – that one day people will realise the flats they’re queuing to buy were built over everything that once made the postcode worth living in.

The mood at the Fox & Anchor is bullishly upbeat, the gender split roughly equal. A Young’s pub and boutique hotel on Charterhouse Street, it opens from 7am and caters to the starchier end of the white-collar spectrum. In the main bar – a Dickensian wet dream of buffed brass and frosted glass – half a dozen Goldman Sachs commodities researchers are chasing plates of the “City boy” breakfast with pints of Guinness. In a panelled snug at the rear, Crossrail executives are comparing manicures over white wine spritzers.

I step outside with the pub’s manager to admire the art nouveau tiled façade – or rather, to say admiring things about it while he checks his watch. Lee’s just been promoted, a reward for revitalising a few pubs south of the river. It’s soon clear he couldn’t give a toss about W. J. Neatby’s artisanal genius. On Smithfield’s early morning trade, though, he has plenty to share.

“Of course early opening will continue,” he smiles, bright as a brochure. “For us anyway. We do it properly. Thanks to us, people are starting to see night workers differently. As you’ve seen, our customers aren’t troublemakers. Far from it. They’re very respectable: doctors from St Bart’s, barristers, judges.” His words do the work of a disinfectant wipe, flicked at something too grubby to name – possibly journalism.

Five pints and three shots in, I wash up at Smiths of Smithfield – a warehouse John “MasterChef” Torode turned into a four-storey café cum cocktail bar cum restaurant. I need food. Ballast. To drop anchor for a bit, to stop myself bobbing away on a sea of booze like a bottle with a “Help me!” note in my worst handwriting stuffed inside.

I stand at the long pewter-topped bar, nursing a pint of gluten-free Czech lager in a way that would get me deregistered. My reflection in the chrome tap says I look like a million dollars – in IOUs. I take a seat near a sharply dressed quartet making elegant, cutlery-assisted arguments in favour of moderation.

I ask for a vat of Americano, eggs Benedict and order another drink, a Tom Collins, before I remember not to. At the next table, two meat market workers in spotless white coats assess my condition with languid amusement. “Started early, did you?” one says. “Don’t know many of our lot who use the pubs now. Most’ve got to drive. Looks like you’ve had their share for them, anyway.”

The welcome is even frostier at St Bart’s Brewery in West Smithfield, which – in defiance of its website – started opening at eleven last week. A man restocking the fridges flicks his chin toward the door and says my thumping on it won’t help.

My attempt to pass as sober goes no better at the forbiddingly proper Bird of Smithfield on Smithfield Street. To keep up appearances I’m required to order breakfast with my Bloody Mary and, once it arrives, I’m quietly exiled to a corner table – presumably in the hope my inebriation might be contained, like a leak.

I begin singing One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer, gently, but with feeling. No one joins in, despite the incessant if irregular beat my spoon is keeping. I’m halfway through the fourth verse when I’m escorted to the door and shown out with a flourish – game show-style – like I’ve just won it.

I need a bar that’s pleased to see me. Somewhere that’s happy to have anyone. A Wetherspoon, then – one of the broad-church chain pubs that’s been serving pints from 9am for the past decade. Few drunken states are considered too disorderly for polite service at a Spoons, where holding your drink is a strictly manual affair and, if you can’t manage that, you’re given a straw.

There’s one on Farringdon Road, close enough – 200 yards – to count for this crawl. Its name, Sir John Oldcastle, feels auspicious. The Lollard rebel was a friend of Henry V and is widely believed to be the model for Shakespeare’s most beloved reprobate Sir John Falstaff.

I buy a half, just to give my right hand something to do, and spot the croupiers I briefly met at the Hope a lifetime ago. They’re winding down from a night shift at the Grosvenor Casino in Russell Square, but they’re wound up, too.

Talk turns quickly to the myth of London as a 24-hour city. “It’s mad we’ve got to schlep to Smithfield for a drink,” says Becky, a twenty-something Mancunian. “Loads work nights, we keep everyone else going, then there’s nothing for us. Cleaners, couriers, hotel staff, shop-fitters, doormen, rickshaw drivers – the service industry gets shit service. Smithfield’s fine, but the meat market’s full of dicks. This morning a butcher in filthy overalls told me I should buy him a drink – ’cause it’s thanks to people like him I can buy one at all.”

A couple of conversations later, I re-enter the outside world, where my dawdling pace earns sneers, sighs and a casual shove. The weather rummages in its box of tricks. A fine rain falls from a thin cowl of cloud, dimpling the puddles. Clever stuff, weather.

I sit on a bench, grinning at strangers like it’s my job, and flick through the book in my head: London – A Tale of Two Johnsons. There’s Samuel, who said a man tired of London is tired of life; and there’s Boris, a moral vacuum with a Latin dictionary, who sees the city not as home but as a lootable asset – a killing to be made for himself and whichever dead-eyed cronies still answer his calls.

No longer drunk, just chemically embarrassed, I close the book, stand and stretch. Suddenly weary, I put out my hand and London takes it. We lean into each other, burbling sweet inanities like sixth-form soulmates at a bus stop. And for a moment – brief, ridiculous, golden – I feel the city loves me almost as much as I love her.

Below is First Call, a raw, beautiful 50-minute doc made in 2000 by Christopher Diorio and Joe Malone. It follows the regulars who drink early – 8am – in the bars of Manhattan. Twenty years on, most of those joints are gone. Gentrification cleaned them out, and Covid finished the job. Still, Jeremy’s Ale House in the Seaport survives, just about. So does Billymark’s West in Chelsea, near Penn Station – grubby, glorious and still doing God's work for the wrecked and the wired.

I’M MAKING MY way home, slowly. This being New Orleans, lanes are closed or sections of them coned off, for sinkholes, for leaks, for fun. I’m reading my future in the licence plate facing me while my tires sink in the road repairs residents have improvised with oyster shells and bitumen. My AC has died – I'm jealous.

An SUV on my left is having trouble staying in its lane. It’s not unusual at this – or any – hour: the city runs on drive-thru daiquiris. I can’t see anyone at the wheel, though it’s raining and I’ve got neon in my eye. Whoever's in there looks about ready to run a red, but the car stalls when a siren fires up nearby.

I draw up alongside. A young Asian woman, early twenties, is shrunk in her seat, pulling faces at the dashboard. She looks at me and I nod, smile and raise my hand. Courtesy achieved, I resume frowning at the road, but she honks her horn, starts waving, gesturing wildly around the car’s interior, as though it's taken her hostage.

In the torchlight of her mobile, she holds up her left foot. Nothing human has ever looked so naked. A familiar dread rises – the sense I've strayed into an adaptation of a folk tale, and there will be parables.

The light changes. She points at a CVS pharmacy on the far side of the intersection. Somehow, it’s understood that I’m going to help. I brake to let her cut in front, drawing angry blasts from cars behind, which I salute with a middle finger.

That she makes it across the road is a miracle – but in Catholic New Orleans, miracles are two a penny. By the time we come to a stop, she is crying, face smooshed against the steering wheel, her nose bubbling with snot. Dusty baggies and drained bottles occupy the passenger seat. She’s heaving with what looks like embarrassment, but in case it’s something more urgent I fetch a bucket from my car and buy her a juice at the nearby Family Dollar. She steadies herself and, between sips, I can see she is working out what she is going to tell me.

Eventually, she doesn't hold back. We are sitting in a stolen vehicle – her sister’s graduation present, though her sister hasn’t driven it yet. Quynh (she's Vietnamese, pronounced “Kwin”) says she dropped out of college for love, but love didn't repay the compliment, and her father isn't forgiving her anytime soon.

“Five years ago, I was a doctor; three years ago, a lawyer; last year, a psychiatrist specialising in people like me. Now we’ve stopped talking about my future. It’s all about my sister’s instead. She’s not going to become a stripper. Dad has hopes for her, fears for me.”

A cop car is doing a circuit, so I dispose of Quynh’s incriminating empties, and give the seats a brush. We sense normality lurking outside, fancying its chances, and exhale slowly, long and then giggly, together.

“I can’t drive back,” she says. “I don’t know the way, and can't follow instructions. Will you call my father and tell him I’m okay and the car’s alright?”

Of course I do. Her dad cries when he hears Quyhn’s safe. She’s been missing for three days. His tremulous relief sets me off, and then her. I agree to return his daughter to Metairie, New Orleans’ suburban neighbour, in the "borrowed" Nissan Rogue.

Quyhn says she wants something to remember our evening by, a song she's not heard before, maybe. I hand her my phone, and she pokes around my Spotify playlists.

We don’t want the journey to end – but that's only because we know it has to – so we sit for 20 minutes half a block from her father’s driveway. It’s still raining, even by New Orleans’ standards, coming down like bats over Bayou Teche, and – almost too fittingly – St Swithin’s Day, by Billy Bragg, comes on.

"The Polaroids that hold us together

will surely fade away –

like the love that we spoke of forever

on St Swithin's Day.”

We part company with a mess of hugs and I book an Uber. I walk towards my pick-up spot and look back to see Quyhn's father squeezing his daughter half to death. In her left hand she's holding the high-rise sandals she couldn’t drive in because the straps were bust.

As well as posting new material on this Substack, I'm rounding up my road stories. This one was prompted by an email this morning. Quynh is nearing the end of her second year of clinical rotations at UAB in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father says “hi” – he always does.