Klas Lundström is an investigative reporter and writer based in Stockholm.
January 15 marks 50 years since the Alvor Agreement promised Angola’s independence from Portugal. Yet the new state was doomed to be a Cold War battleground, with Washington planners seeking to avenge their defeat in Vietnam.
Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández has been jailed in the US for drug trafficking. But the narco-state he ran was a product of US foreign policy and of the US-backed coup against Manuel Zelaya’s left-wing government.
It’s been 70 years since the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala ousted President Jacobo Árbenz. He was punished for standing up to Chiquita — but today, the firm might finally be held to account for its ties to a far-right paramilitary group in Colombia.
More than three decades since dictator Alfredo Stroessner was forced from office, his Partido Colorado still runs Paraguay. Its leader Horacio Cartes fuses mafia and political power — and is stepping up his authoritarian control.
Fifty years since Portugal’s democratic revolution, the far-right Chega party is on the rise. It’s exploiting disaffection with mainstream parties — but also nostalgia for the days when dictator António de Oliveira Salazar ruled a Portuguese empire.
In 1978, an Argentine military junta that murdered tens of thousands hosted the World Cup and got a chance to refurbish their image. We talk to a prisoner who watched the game with her torturers — a World Cup seen from hell.