The Ex-Worker

Welcome to Episode 4 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. This week’s installment continues the previous episode’s exploration of the conditions south of the border that drive migration north by surveying the situation in the three countries of the “Northern Triangle.” Guatemala’s malnourished, heavily indigenous population languishes in poverty under oligarchic rule, the legacy of centuries of colonialism and a devastating civil war. Our narrator analyzes the numerous problems plaguing the country and examines the unfinished struggle for freedom and dignity that prompted the war, including its impact on global revolutionary imagination through its influence on the Zapatistas. The horrifying levels of violence in El Salvador trace their roots both to economic pressures and to US support for the former reactionary military regime during a bloody civil war. The section concludes with a hair-raising anecdote about the guerri