The system is broken. The political system, the way we are organized politically on this island is broken.

We've allowed this Puerto Rican elite class that's mostly white, mostly male, mostly privileged

to kind of run this country into the ground for the last 40 years.

Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

You know, occasionally there'll be a protest somewhere in the world that will break through

to American news consumption. American news consumption tends to be pretty

America domestic focused generally when you go to other places in the world, it tends to spend a lot more time on other places in the world.

And there's a lot of reasons for that. But putting that aside, you will see like a Hong Kong protest, for instance, protest videos, people in the streets.

And it's always sort of remarkable to watch people assemble and mass numbers to take to the streets demanding political change.

You know, you'll see the images in the case of Hong Kong, you know, people with umbrellas, hundreds of thousands in the streets, people with sort of mass over their face breaking into the legislature.

And you just are completely ill equipped with the context to understand what like wow, they are really angry and organized.

And there's a lot of them. And so then you may, you know, go read an article on the news about the extradition legislation that's been proposed that would essentially allow those in Hong Kong to be extradited back to the Chinese mainland.

And this is true to rear square is true of all kinds of protests you see the May den in Ukraine a few years ago during various color revolutions.

Well, we've got one of those in the US. It's not a foreign story. There's one of those happened this last week in the US in the American territory.

Some would say my next guest would say colony of Puerto Rico in Puerto Rico hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets through sustained protest for 12 13 14 days somewhere around there.

Demanding the resignation of Ricardo Rosseo who is the governor of Puerto Rico. That's what the chief executive of that territory colony commonwealth is called the governor.

And for a while, he was trying to not resign, but then eventually he did. And I probably like you I, you know, I follow I read a lot of newspaper articles every day.

I probably read literally hundreds. I follow the news extremely closely. And I had some idea of what was going on in Puerto Rico. But as I saw these images as I saw people in my Twitter feed because I follow some people in from Puerto Rico on Twitter.

I just hope people I know who are either of Puerto Rican extraction or have Puerto Rican loved ones tweeting about it. I got more and more curious about OK, well, I get that people view this guy's corrupt. But like what what's going on here? What is going on here?

And wanted to do a podcast about it. And this is said podcast. So today we're going to talk to Julio Ricardo Varela Julio is born in Puerto Rico grew up between Puerto Rico and the states as you will hear.

He's a journalist. He's co-host of the podcast in the thick. He's founder of a great media organization called Latino rebels, both a part of Futuro media. So he and Maria and also who he may know who has been on my program both weekends and on all in.

They do a ton of reporting on Latinx issues, not just things like Puerto Rico or migration, but the full panoply and they do an incredible work. And Julio is just a really like kind of amazing knowledgeable guy.

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