15 Days in Guantánamo

Latino USA

Futuro Media and PRX

Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the first days of his migration journey, “Juan” posed for a photo outside a bus terminal to remember the moment. Two years and two thousand miles later, it landed him in the crosshairs of a recently-elected Trump administration determined to wage an all out war on immigrants, and on a plane to Guantánamo Bay.

Today, the story of how one Venezuelan migrant ended up inside one of the world's most infamous prisons, and what he experienced while he was there. Plus, a conversation with one of the lawyers of Mahmoud Khalil about what Trump’s crackdown on migrants means for us all.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Dear listener, before we start, just a warning that suicide is going to come up in this piece.
0:12.6	Take care.
0:14.0	Juan is a former migrant from Venezuela.
0:17.4	He remembers the day two years ago when he posed for a photograph that would end up changing his life.
0:28.0	It was September of 2022, and he and a small group of his family members had just arrived in Ibaque, in Western Colombia.
0:37.0	It was the first days of a long journey to the United States
0:40.1	where he hoped to find work, a new life,
0:42.7	all of it far away from the economic and political crises
0:46.3	in his homeland in Venezuela.
0:53.2	When the group spotted a monument of an old train car outside the bus terminal,
0:58.6	it felt like the perfect spot to take a picture to document the moment.
1:03.8	It's an old train engine surrounded by colorful flowers.
1:08.5	It's a group of five men and one woman all in their 20s,
1:11.9	and they stand there smiling at the camera.
1:15.7	Juan sits on one side of the train engine, giving a thumbs up.
1:19.9	He looks happy.
1:21.6	He was happy.
1:32.3	Now almost two years and two thousand miles later,
1:37.3	this photo would land Juan in one of the most infamous prisons on earth that's run by the U.S. government.
1:40.1	It's called Guantanamo.
1:47.0	From Futur Media and PRX, it's Latino USA.
1:50.8	I'm Maria Injoosa.
	...

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