Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, May 14th, 1958, Vice President Richard Nixon is on an 18-day Goodwill tour of South America,

and when he reaches Caracas, Venezuela, things take a violent turn.

Angry crowds inflamed by anti-American sentiment,

protesting US policies surrounded Nixon's motorcade

and unleashed a barrage of rocks and other objects.

Nixon's trip had been a rocky one in some countries,

it was kind of your typical diplomatic stuff, calm, and a little stuffy,

and then in others it was much more chaotic,

but nothing quite like what

happened in Venezuela broken glass and flying rocks and the car being

surrounded and lots more so let's talk about the attack on Nixon in Caracas, 1958, the larger context and the aftermath here, as always,

Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello, there. Hello, Jody.

Hey there.

Taking one big step back and referring to an episode we did fairly recently,

we talked a little bit about how coming out of World War II and heading into the height of the Cold War, you know, the Europe

had the Marshall Plan and Latin America never really had a kind of sense at least in terms of US foreign policy and support, you know, a sense of like this is a concerted effort to how we're going to approach this region and there were efforts to do that and

they never really coalesced for a bunch of reasons but it feels like that's the larger context here for

why Nixon is on this goodwill so to speak tour a real sense that Latin America is a huge geopolitical pawn, player,

force, something in the looming emerging red versus blue game of risk that is geopolitics in the

...