My dear ITTee listener, it's Maria Innojosa here.

And it's Julio Riccolo Varela here.

So we're coming off of a July 4th weekend.

And we decided that we're going to share one of our favorite episodes from 2020 that's really super powerful.

It's about militarization in this country and how the military recruitment targets specifically POC communities, particularly black Americans, Latinos, also very high in the Pacific

Islander community, Guam. So this particular episode is going to focus on the case of Vanessa

Guillen, who was a soldier in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. She went missing in April

of 2020, and she had already been reporting

instances of sexual assault in the military. After two months, her remains were found. Her death

really exposed and resurfaced issues of sexual violence, rape, race, other injustices,

misogyny.

What back in the day when I was covering this was called military sexual trauma, i.e.

the amount of sexual assault happening by officers at any level assault happening among soldiers.

Right, right.

And since Vanessa's death over a year ago, and actually since we released this episode last

summer, we just wanted to share some updates with y'all.

So after Vanessa was killed, an Army investigation to Fort Hood, which already had a

history of violent deaths, suicides, and sexual harassment complaints found, and I'm

quoting, major flaws at the base leading to the firing or suspension of over a dozen officials.

And in late June, Congresswoman Veronica Escobar of Texas, along with co-leads, Congresswoman

Jackie Spear and Congressman Mike Turner introduced

the Vanessa Guillen Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act, which is a bipartisan

...