The Hello everybody. My wife Tammy and I recently had the privilege of touring through

Mexico and South America. We didn't tour obviously through the whole continent.

We went to a couple of places in Brazil and to Chile and to Mexico and I met some very

interesting people along the way which is always something that happens

including the gentleman I'm talking to today, Axel

Kaiser Behrance, Von Hoenhagen.

He's a Chilean German lawyer, a master in investments, commerce and arbitration, master Master of Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy from the University

of Heidelberg in Germany.

It's a very good university.

He is co-founder and president of the foundation for progress in Chile, one of the most influential

free market think tanks in Latin America.

He's also a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute in Washington and director of the Friedrich Hayek chair at

Adolpho Ibenez University from 2016 to 2024. So why are we talking? Well, I thought it would be good to bring everyone an update on the political and ideological situation in South America.

Now that's an impossible thing to do obviously in the course of a 90 minute

podcast because it's very complicated to talk about a whole continent and much of what

we focused on was to do with the events that are transpiring in Venezuela,

where the age-old conflict between what's essentially a crooked, corrupt, propagandistic, draconian communist totalitarian state and the people and the opposition to that state is transpiring.

And so we walked through the situation in Venezuela.

There was a recent election there, the incumbent the aforementioned totalitarian Maduro apparently lost and is very unlikely to give up power. Why should anyone care? Well, the world is a small place now and what happens everywhere has an effect that's local.

If South America is destabilized you can expect a lot more trouble

for example at the southern U.S. border and by a lot I mean a lot I mean millions of people and if the

communist dystopian and their Iranian Chinese and Russian propagandaistic backers and troublemakers get their way there's going to be

...