Hello and welcome this is the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week life in the Soviet Union during

Stalin's great terror in the 1930s.

Secret police everywhere, everybody spying on everybody else, everybody suspicious of everybody else.

And people at that time being liquidated every night.

Also, eyewitness accounts of the Milai massacre during the Vietnam War, both victims and perpetrators.

Plus we have Latvians who fought alongside Hitler's Nazis in the Second World War and Brazil's

faltering return to democracy in the 1980s.

Tank River Nevis has been elevated to a state of almost

sainthood.

That's all coming up later, but we begin very close to home.

This past week has marked eighty years since a key moment in the history of the BBC. It was in March 1938 that we first

started broadcasting radio programs in Spanish and Portuguese. This was an era of

intense competition for legitimacy over the airwaves.

The new BBC Language Services were launched amid rising concerns about the influence of

Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in Central and South America.

With the help of the Archives, Mike Lanchin has been looking back at the birth of the BBC's Latin American service.

From London and BBC, greetings to all listeners in Central and South America. I'm speaking here

before sunrise in the early hours of an English spring morning. It was in the early hours of an English spring morning.

It was in the small hours of March the 15th, 1938,

March the 14th in Latin America,

that the BBC's first Director General, Lord John Reith, welcomed what he hoped would be a huge

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