Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Antonio Salazar: The Smartest Fascist Dictator

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Antonio Salazar spends his post-war years helping the CIA learn how to torture people and starting a disastrous war with a large portion of Africa. Then he dies! Hooray! Sources:Antonio Salazar de Oliveira of Portugal and his Estado Novo Antonio Salazar: A Quiet Autocrat Who Held Power in Portugal for 40 Years - The New York Times Did Salazar have a love life? Part 2 – Portugal Resident https://www.lemonde.fr/en/history/article/2024/04/25/50-years-ago-the-carnation-revolution-ended-portugal-s-dictatorship-in-one-night_6669464_157.html 50 years ago, the Carnation Revolution ended Portugal's dictatorship in one night Portugal: End of the Salazar Era | TIME Portugal’s secret police – Portugal Resident The PIDE and Portuguese Society under the Salazar Dictatorship 1945-1974: Fear, SelfPolicing, Accommodation. | ICS Portugal’s Dictatorship: Salazar’s Estado Novo - Portugal.com Sci-Hub | Framing Sexual Violence in Portuguese Colonialism: On Some Practices of Contemporary Cultural Representation and Remembrance. Violence Against Women, 25(13), 1558–1577 | 10.1177/1077801219869547 The war that tears Estado Novo down | NewsMuseum friedheim_pub - salazar - leaders of europe 1995.ashx Sci-Hub | | 10.2307/180995 Colonialism and Genocide in Portuguese Africa Three graphics that explain Portuguese colonialism · Global Voices 118979704.pdf Portugal, declassified – POLITICO Acousmatic and Acoustic Violence and Torture in the Estado Novo: The Notorious Revelations of the PIDE/DGS Trial in 1957 SalazarandBritish.pdf Acousmatic and Acoustic Violence and Torture in the Estado Novo: The Notorious Revelations of the PIDE/DGS Trial in 1957 Sci-Hub | Framing Sexual Violence in Portuguese Colonialism: On Some Practices of Contemporary Cultural Representation and Remembrance. Violence Against Women, 25(13), 1558–1577 | 10.1177/1077801219869547 Sci-Hub | | 10.2307/180995 Françafrique: A brief history of a scandalous word                      Sci-Hub | | 10.2307/180995See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, it's Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you know what it is because you're listening to it and you're listening to part two of our episodes on Antonio Salazar, so you're probably not tuning into the show for the first time going, I wonder what this series is. I'm going to click on an episode about a guy I've never heard of that's clearly labeled as part two. Like, no one who would do that I mean, yeah are tuning in. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Who would do like no one?

So if you know, it's good. Yeah, no, I liked it. That's okay. It's okay spray the water bottle So our guest today Jeff May that rhymed but I didn't mean for it to. Look, man, I have a very rhymeable name. You do, you do. It's true. It's useful. It's like a permissive verb. It was useful in this exactly one instance.

It's a month. Like people love, some teachers saw my name and they never stopped. No, no, yeah, you can vamp on that for a solid 15 minutes of what's supposed to be a math class Oh, it's great Jeff may if you were Jeff April we would not have had you on the show. Oh, I get it. Yeah abs absolutely not Jeff Jeff

June maybe that that actually has a kind of nice ring to it, you know, yeah On the show. Yeah. Jeff July, no. It's still a literative, but I don't like it. I don't know why. I almost dated a girl named Maisie. She went by May.

Maisie May, oh my God. And then she quickly pumped. Yeah, no, yeah, you can't get too serious with that one. I was like, but come on. And she's like, this is just not going to work. It's not going to work. There's one reason for that. Yeah.

This is an iHeart podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen and I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, amplify the voices of women in sports. Thank you for supporting I Heart Women's Sports and our founding sponsors, Elf Beauty, Capital One and Novartis. Just open the free I Heart app and search I Heart Women's Sports to listen now. I'm Ian Pfaff, the creator and host of the Uncle Chris podcast. My Uncle Chris was a real character, a garbage truck driver from South Carolina who is now buried in Panama City alongside the founding families of Panama. He also happens to be responsible for the craziest night of my life. Wild stories about adventure, romance, crime, history,

and war intertwine as I share the tall tales and hard truths that have helped me understand Uncle Chris. Listen now to Uncle Chris on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant. For my heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is The Turning, River Road. In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a

secret life of abuse. But in 2014, the youngest escaped. Listen to The Turning, River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So we're back and we're talking about part two. In the end of part one, Antonio Salazar had established his new state and established a secret police force with a torture prison that occasionally had to deal with noise ordinance

violations in order to- A little loud? Yeah, a little loud, a little loud, a little loud. They had to quiet it down a little bit. Can you just bring it a little? Yeah. On the torture. Guys, we love the torture prison. We're we're we're yimbies when it comes to torture prisons, but they have to abide by like the neighborhood noise ordinances. Yeah, we have quiet hours.

Yeah, we've got quiet hours. No, no torturing after 9 PM. Come on, how hard is that? We know this. Yeah. So Salazar's first actions after coming to power are all focused on returning some sort of financial stability to Portugal. Now I don't mean to confuse this with prosperity or even the kind of fraudulent economic boom

that the Nazis manufactured after Hitler's return, right? Portugal never really thrives to a massive extent during Salazar's reign. It will remain per capita one of the poorest nations in Europe, but the economy stops cycling, right? Where there's these deep troughs and these recoveries, it kind of stays on an even keel. And even though that's still not very good for most of the people, there's a lot more stability. So first off, the people with money, the capitalist class, are a lot happier because stability means you can make predictable investments and whatnot and get predictable returns. And the regular people at least aren't dealing with these sudden, drastic downturns every

couple of years or whatever, right? And so things are a lot more stable. Now this allows him, one of his first measures taken in office was to take, and he's, you know, Salazar isn't coming out. He launches an austerity program, a very radical cut to the bone austerity program. And this is not entirely his own devising. There had been recommendations the league of nations had made to Portugal. And he takes those recommendations.

And under this austerity program, the poor and the peasant classes in Portugal suffer mightily. And again, that should tell you, despite a lot of the sympathies between him and, you know, Hitler and whatnot, this is not a populist movement, right? Woodrow Wilson blew it. Right. Yeah. He really did. The League of Nations, just about as big a fuck up as it could possibly have been, despite being a much cooler name than the United Nations. Who wouldn't rather be in a league?

Talk about a 180 on that guy, huh? Oh boy, yeah. It was just like, we're not gonna talk to anybody, but also what if we had a Justice League? But we should have like an international order, yeah. So he's able to balance the budget right which makes him popular among the people who are holding power You see this as the the fastest route to stability as the writer Alan K Smith noted This was often a brutal process for regular people

quote the principles which guided him were the elimination of wastefulness the reduction of spending to a minimum and Complete control over every aspect of life which involved governmental expenditure. No matter how pressing their needs, areas such as rural development, the health services, and education would have to wait until the necessary surplus was at hand." So Salazar is like, fuck you,

I'm not doing anything to help people until we've got enough spare money to afford it, right? Like we're not gonna go into debt just to take care of people. Like we're going to cut it to the end. Whatever suffering the peasantry has to make, it's necessary as long as we can kind of keep the economy and the wealthy on track, right?

Rude, it's a little rude. It's kind of a dick. It's a Rudy Huxtable we like to say. And he's not at all, he's not even going to play at being like I'm speaking for the people I'm the representative of the people, you know The people like there's not even that kind of like that like guys, right? He would state directly that his philosophy of leadership was quote the Portuguese must be treated as children too much too often would spoil them

He added quote. I say the same thing though. Yeah, you're always saying that. And it really pisses off our Portuguese listeners. People know this about me and the Portuguese. Yeah. Yeah. Those windbags to quote from one of our other bastards. The truth is that I am profoundly anti-parliamentarian. I hate the speeches, the verbosity and the flowery meaningless interpolations, the way we waste passion, not around any great idea, but just around futilities, nothingness from the point of view of the national good So he's very much this like look I'm not giving anybody anything But at least I'm not like grandstanding about some bullshit while failing to deliver

Right, like I'm an asshole and I'm not you know handing you anything nice But I'm also keeping the economy from crashing right like that's Like that's his argument for why he should stay in power. And it works surprisingly well. Part of why is that while he gets the credit for his economic policies and the way that they do work, he's almost invisible outside of them. He is not doing mass rallies. People are not marching in the streets as he like stands in a

reviewing stand and gives some sort of weird little salute He invented he avoids any mass public displays, right? Which leads to this errant belief Internationally people will say that oh Portugal they got so lucky. They have a dictatorship without a dictator, which is nonsense That's not what's happening. He's very much a dictator, but there's this desire, especially from a lot of international, like capitalist conservatives, to be like, oh, Portugal's really figured it out. They've got all the benefits of a Hitler without having Hitler, you know? Maybe we could do what they're doing, right?

And that's not the case. That's not an accurate way to describe Salazar's regime or any regime that's ever existed. The reality is that very few of the 20th century's authoritarians exercised more direct control over their national economy or government policy than Antonio Salazar. You could argue Salazar is much more of a dictator

in the direct literal sense that even Hitler was, right? Hitler is a delegator, right? He has his things he's interested in. He mostly lets other people handle most things, in part because you can like defray blame for shit that way. Salazar is kind of the opposite of a lot of these guys in that he's all about direct personal control of especially economic policy,

but a lot of other government policies. And he doesn't want to do the other crap, right? He doesn't want to do the big reviewing stand marches. He doesn't want to do the other crap, right? He doesn't want to do the big reviewing stand marches. He doesn't want to do the military adventurism. So it's less accurate to say Portugal is a dictatorship without a dictator and more Salazar is a dictator without a cult of personality, right? What a waste.

Yeah, what a waste. You could have, you could have had so much more fun with it, man. Oh my God, you know, Hitler had his flare. Where's your Salazar flare? Come on. It would have been awesome, man. He blew it. Tragic. Especially with a name as cool as Salazar. Oh my God. It's a good name. It's a solid dictator name. Yeah. Man, what a waste. But it is better for political stability.

And as dictator, Salazar is all about stability. And this is going to be the thing that ultimately saves him where his peers get led to ruin, right? Unlike Hitler, he doesn't, whatever he says about helping return Portugal to greatness, he's not really interested in returning his nation to some false prelapsarian version of greatness or even erasing the humiliations of the past.

He wants to bring stability and then hold the line, right? That's the kind of guy he is also that's the best song by Toto That is the best song by Toto hold the line and Salazar would have agreed with you and I think well No, no said he passes in 74. So he couldn't have heard Toto I think he would have liked Africa to be 100% would have liked it Unfortunately, his history one of his downfalls is that he likes Africa way too much. Yeah Yeah, yeah. He's just like all these other casuals that think Africa is the best song by Toto. I know, I know.

That's his big problem. He's a fucking casual Toto fan is what he is. That's what brings about the revolution against him is the fact that he's a fake Toto fan and everyone knows it. Yeah. They're like, come on, man, the revolution isn't always on time. No, no, no. Again. No, no, no again No, no, no, that's why we brought you in Jeff

That's why I get brought in for all the hottest hottest takes on total current musical hits Because I only know to make two jokes about Toto and we already ran through them So Salazar he's the only dictator kind of in this period who is going to really perfectly jink and run and like avoid kind of the different sort of dangers of this moment in European history. The pitfalls, if you will.

The pitfalls, right. Like he's never gonna be an invade Russia guy. And he's going to play a big role in helping his peer in Spain, Francisco Franco, avoid some of these same pitfalls, unfortunately. Now Portugal has a complex history with Spain. They'd been invaded and occupied in the past. He's super worried.

Like every Portuguese leader is, that Spain is going to come for Portugal at some point. Just looking out the blinds. Yeah, looking out the blinds, being like, is Spain out there? Fuck. What are is Spain out there? Fuck, they always are. What are they doing out there? So you've got this civil war that gets started in Spain between these Republicans and Franco, and Salazar sees the Republic,

which looks like it's gonna win at first, as a threat to his continued independence, right? If the Republic wins the war, maybe they'll come for us, and then maybe my regime is doomed, and Portuguese independence is doomed. And Salazar extends his support to Franco, right? So he backs Franco during a crucial early stage in the civil war.

He allows Germany and Italy to use his territory to transfer troops and materiel to Franco's army, which is a critical aspect of like how Franco is able to get enough military aid to win. Salazar allows Portuguese volunteers to fight for the fascists in Spain, and he uses his secret police and security forces to raid and arrest Republican sympathizers

and refugees in his own territory. And these are the years, because he's letting Italy and Germany in, because he's helping Franco, these are the years in which his movement most resembles the other fascist movements in Europe. Salazar deliberately cribs for Mussolini and Hitler in particular.

Per a write up in the New York Times, quote, he created a youth movement along Hitlerian lines principally to prepare the younger people for military service and the Portuguese Legion, which was dedicated to combating internal communism. These organizations with the army proved useful in putting down a popular outbreak in Lisbon just prior to World War II. So not only does he kind of ally with the fascists in this period, is he starts putting out

these kind of like trappings of fascism where it's like, well, let's get a youth fighting movement in the street. We need, in addition to the military, we need these civilian combat organizations, these paramilitaries that are sort of given a free pass by the police to crack down on the left and to stop them from gaining too much power and overthrowing the government,

to stop the communists primarily, right? I thought you meant fighting the youth. No, no, no, no. He is getting the fighting youth together, right? Under his back, right? Like that's his plan during this period, right? There's obviously the youth who are organizing on behalf of communism and, you know, for a return to the republic. These are the people that he's having a secret police go after and that he's sort of allowing these paramilitaries to fight against, right? Now, during this period,

pre-World War II, he's known to keep a bust of Mussolini in his office, and he'll regularly ask his Hitler during the height of his power. But he's also pretty clear in his own statements about what he sees as the difference between his fascist allies and his own new state regime. Quote, Now obviously our dictatorship is similar to the fascist dictatorship in its strengthening of authority and the war in which it declares on certain democratic principles, in its nationalist character and its maintenance of the social order. It is different, however, in its methods of renovation.

The fascist dictatorship is leaning towards a pagan Caesarism." And that's what Salazar doesn't want. For one thing, he is a Catholic and he makes an alliance with the Catholic Church where we will allow the Catholic Church, we'll bring back a lot of these powers that had been stripped from it to provide for like the social safety net. And we'll also institute all these laws that are very friendly to the way the Catholic church wants things to be run. And that's very different from like Germany, which is, you know, the Nazi regime is an anti-Catholic regime in some ways, right? They have to co-opt Catholicism, but they never are really comfortable with it

because the church is another center of power. And Salazar is okay with there being another center of power. As long as it helps kind of take away from his burden, he sees this as like a worthwhile thing. And he's also just a believer in Catholicism. And so this is why he's very consciously like, we'll take some things that the fascists are doing, but like, I'm not this weird kind of like pagan esoteric thing that Hitler is like, that seems strange to me. And I don't want to go too far down that road because it's a lot of work and I feel like it's going to get this fucker in trouble.

Right? Yeah. He's very, he's very smart. Yeah. It's not, it's not hard to read the writing on the wall. When it being like, yeah, we should take over like the whole. Everything, yeah.

Maybe we should just go over and take over. The Soviet Union, yeah. Oh, kicking the door, yeah. Salazar's like, that seems like a lot of work. Take it over the Soviet Union. For one thing, there's like 30 Portuguese people. I do like the idea that he's just so like chill with his little pocket He's content with what he has. It's just like a project for him. He's like man. Yeah, you gotta get in Portugal move it man

We gotta we gotta yeah, we gotta do our thing. We gotta fix this up and we don't need he's also Indicates we'll talk about Portugal owns a lot of Africa, right? He's not he's not content with a tiny amount of the world, but he doesn't want to like expand massively. He's trying to keep a hold on what they've got, right? So he doesn't go too far into the kind of delusions that are going to lead Hitler and Mussolini to ruin. And also he's not doing a racism or an antisemitism, is he?

I mean, he's antisemitic and like by arse, but it's not like a governing principle, right? He's 1930s anti-Semitic, which is just every. And in this, you know, after the war, there will be a Portuguese colonial war that's very racist, right? But that's not the guiding light initially of his regime. It's more something that makes sense as time goes on and they wind up in these

colonial conflicts, like the racism kind of follows naturally, but there's not this, he doesn't come to power with like, we're going to wipe out this racial group in order to fix Portugal, right? That's never a part of his politics, you know? And so that's a big difference between like the Nazis, right? Um, now Salazar is also, despite the fact that he is allied with Franco and really helps him take power in Spain, he's never, he never trusts Franco all that much.

Tom Gallagher, his biographer describes them as having him as having a wary association with Franco's regime. And while Franco restores the monarchy in Spain, Salazar never gives serious consideration towards a return to the monarchy, right? Cause that's too much of a compromise with power for him, of his own power. And this political alliance that defines his regime in this period isn't the pure result of a populist fascist party winning the struggle for power. Per Gallagher, quote, his formula was to create a ruling alliance of conservatives, some moderate

liberals and a few nationalists' ideologues kept in being by his political agility and guaranteed ultimately by the armed forces. So it's just much more of this compromise regime that he's willing to make, because he's just kind of, he's a pragmatic guy. Now this is ultimately what will save his regime and Franco's regime.

At least there's an argument that it saves Franco's regime during the Second World world war because Franco only wins his civil war because of the help he gets from the continental fascist powers, right? Like he gets very famously, the German air force is going to bomb a bunch of places for Franco, right? And despite the fact that you would think, and Hitler had kind of expected, well, obviously once I wind up in a big war,

Spain is going to back me, right? And Franco never does this. He refuses, he doesn't go on the side of the allies, right? He doesn't outright betray Germany, but he never throws his hat into the ring with the Axis once the fighting begins in earnest. The reasons for this are complex, and they have a lot to do with Portugal's

traditionally warm relationship with Great Britain, complex and they have a lot to do with Portugal's traditionally warm relationship with Great Britain because Salazar gets a lot of credit for stopping Franco from going all in on the fascists during this war and from like outright allying with them. There's a lot of debate as to like how much credit, how much of this was Franco just kind of recognizing this is a bigger risk than I want to take. But Salazar, at least according to one version of the story, is a major part of what keeps Franco out.

Part of why Salazar is like this is even though he's got a lot of sympathies with the fascists and a good relationship with them, he still has a good relationship with Great Britain, who had been Portugal's traditional ally. So, Salazar never sees, even though he gets lumped in as a fascist in this period, he never sees politics in simple terms of fascist versus anti-fascist, right? Or even authoritarian versus democratic. Instead, he acts based on a much simpler logical rubric, which is that Portugal's small and we don't have any ability to project military force in a way that matters on the level of

a great power. So we have to be careful and we can't piss off anyone too much, right? Or overcommit our, he's not gonna do, he would never back the fascists militarily because like, what am I gonna do? Send soldiers to fucking Russia? I'm gonna have Portuguese troops fighting in fucking Russia?

What the hell is that gonna do, right? I would, but I'm built different. You would, yeah, but you would- I would do it, but you know. You would, yeah, but you would- I would do it. But, you know. He's probably influenced here by the fact that he just watched the Republicans burn a lot of their goodwill by getting involved in World War I,

and he's like, I'm just not gonna do that. Like, that could never be me. Built different. It's actually kind of like a big and obvious thing to see is like, hey, the guy that went to school knows not to do the Hitler stuff. Yeah, eh, seems bad. Nah, no thank you. You know, like, I, the guy that went to school knows not to do the Hitler stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Seems bad. Nah, no thank you.

You know, like, I mean, Hitler was a soldier that, that went to jail for trying to overthrow the government. Yeah. Like this guy sucks. And this guy, this, I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb and you know what? You can hear me out first. Sure. Hitler sucks.

Not cool. Not my favorite guy. Yeah. Sure. Hitler sucks. Not cool. Not my favorite guy. Yeah, not a cool dude. And also, but really sucks at like knowing what to do. You know? Yeah, yeah. When to get, when to, you know, when to roll the dice. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is funny. Like when you talk about like the value of an education and like the irony being like, you know, it's a pretty valuable thing to learn about education is how to not get all of your people murdered. Yeah. How to avoid that shit.

Yeah. And it's also, he's also got this thing going for him where, you know, unlike in Germany and Germany had been the Kaiser's regime that had, you know, gotten every into world war two. And in Portugal, it had been the democracy, the Republic that had made that choice, right? And so he's just got, he's a little bit, you know, he's gun shy because he's looking at the immediate past

and he's like, nah, fuck that shit. I'm just, it could never be me, bro. Could never be me. Not me. Yeah. Not me. Yeah, smart man, unfortunately. So he plays a role, a lot of people will argue,

in keeping Franco neutral. And there's significant evidence that he operates with the direct help of the British government in doing this, that he is communicating with the British Empire's diplomats because of this longstanding alliance. Early in the war, British intelligence would pass on messages to Salazar, which he would take to Franco, in order to negotiate backdoor deals to keep Spain out of direct involvement in the war, British intelligence would pass on messages to Salazar, which he would take to Franco in order to negotiate backdoor deals to keep Spain out of direct involvement

in the war. And this is really stressful for his hair goes gray, like, cause it's the fascists are looking pretty good early in the war. And there's a lot of pressure. Franco's like, maybe we ought to get involved. We could get some shit out of this. Right. And probably a lot of even people on like Franco's side

are like, why are we not backing the clear winners? And Salazar like, and he gets, but he gets increasingly like- Pump the brakes, homie. This ages him by like 10 or 15 years. Most people will agree he's visibly older by the time the war ends. He got the Obama treatment.

He gets the, he goes gray. Churchill's people are like, he started snapping at us and yelling at us whenever we talked. And he almost seems like he's losing treatment, huh? He gets the, he goes gray. Churchill's people are like, he started snapping at us and yelling at us whenever we talked to him. He always seems like he's losing it, right? Like he is not, this is not an easy time for him. To be fair. He's not like negotiating this simply, right? A pretty stressful era for most of Europe.

World War II, right. Just Switzerland just looking over, being like, they got some weird going on, right? How strong are our borders, right? Good luck guys. Yeah. So his role in this is substantial enough and keeping Franco out of the war

that Churchill's government organizes three separate tokens of appreciation for Salazar's efforts. The first in September of 1940 is a written letter of thanks directly from Winston Churchill. The second they're like, you know what? This written letter of thanks isn't enough.

Let's lean on Oxford and let's have Oxford give Salazar an honorary degree. That's a good move. Yeah, yeah, no, that's smart. Yeah, make him an honorary. That letter's kind of like, who gives a shit really? Yeah, who gives a, oh thanks, yeah, thank you, thank you. Yeah. Thanks, drunk.

Yeah, so basically the government leans on Oxford and Oxford is like they send a team to Coimbra University Where he had been a professor and we're like, yeah Let's uh, let's give the dictator a degree, right? And then the third thing that the British do is they upgrade the ambassador to Portugal, right? And this is like a very literal thing where they're like it had been a low-ranking member of the nobility and they send a much higher Ranking a member of the nobility to be the ambassador. Yeah, that's always fun. Right, yeah, like now you've got a guy who's closer

to the king, who's the ambassador, because we like you that much, right? And they expand the size. It is a gift, but it is also a smart political strategy as well. Yeah, make him feel valued. If you see somebody doing a certain thing where there's a potential that you could turn them into an ally. You want you want to

butter them up. So you do want a higher ranking. Yeah, it's sort of like how like the ambassador of Mexico was historically like a pretty cushy but high ranking. Yeah. Job because it was like there are next door neighbors and that's really cool I guess. This is why, I mean, this is, you know, in our podcast, Jeff, when we reached out to you, we actually had the Duke of Windsor, you know, email you asking if you wanted to be on the podcast, which a lot of people don't know that Danel,

our audio editor, is the Duke of Windsor. I was gonna say, we have history, and so I actually did not appreciate that. Yeah, well, yeah, you do. You were in the IRA for a period of time in the nineties. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. You know who else was in the IRA in the 1990s? Probably HelloFresh.

Yeah, hello, almost certainly. I mean, actually that's way too cool for HelloFresh. No, no. Hello Thatcher is what it was called. Yeah, Hello Thatcher, we brought a bomb. Uh, see HelloFresh, we can be mean to you or we can be nice to you, right? If you want us to make more comparisons with you

in a terrorist group, but like, you know, a popular one, send us some money. Yeah. A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified

in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's crime lab, we'll learn

about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Authram, the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kelly Harnett spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit.

I'm 100% innocent. While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch. Because oh God, Harnett, jailhouse lawyer. And as she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for the women locked up alongside her. You're supposed to have faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her. So many of these women had lived the same stories. I said, were you a victim of domestic violence? And she was like, yeah.

But maybe Kelly could change the ending. I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals out of here? I'm going to be the first one to do that. This is the story of Kelly Harnett, a woman who spent 12 years fighting not just for her own freedom, but her girlfriends too. I think I have a mission from God to save souls by getting people out of prison. The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer.

Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So what happened at Chappaquiddick? Well, it really depends on who you talk to. There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond. And left a woman behind to drown. There's a famous headline, I think,

in the New York Daily News. It's, Teddy escapes, lawn drowns. And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you. The story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes. Will Ted become president? Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control.

And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal. The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it. So is there a curse? Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family. Listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. American history is full of wise people. Well women said something like, you know, 99.99% of war is diarrhea and 1% is glory. Those founding fathers were gossipy AF and they loved to cut each other down. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions about American history and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer. Hamilton pauses and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. And Jefferson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator

based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. It would have been harder to fake it than to do it. Listen to American history hotline on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about HelloFresh, proud sponsors of the IRA. Wow. Yeah. I don't know, Sophie.

I said the same thing when I found that out, Sophie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It surprises a lot of people. Speaking of surprising, Salazar, surprisingly good at being the dictator of Portugal. So the fact that the British are really leaning on him to help keep Franco out of the war is a big ask for the man. But it's also, you know, Franco, this is not a smooth relationship.

He and Salazar are not, this is not easy. Franco is never as committed to the international fascist cause as Hitler and Mussolini, right? He is like Salazar and Iberian, but he's also an opportunist in these early years of sweeping fascist success He gets really angry at Salazar for like holding him back in one notable moment he complains that Salazar is untimido like a a weakling, right? Like he's timid, he's weak. And the frustration is buoyed by the manner in which Salazar controls his military, because he's, a lot of guys in his military

are kind of on the Franco side of things here, and he keeps replacing these guys in power, and replacing them with these younger lickspittles that he can trust to be loyal to him. And he appoints so many kids in their 30s, over-experienced officers, that like longstanding members of the military to be loyal to him. And they he appoints so many kids in their thirties over experienced officers that like long standing members of the military start to get angry and kind of like feeling frustrated. What is this doge? Yeah, yeah. What is the thing? Like he's doing kind of a doge thing

here, right? And this is very different from like a career military man like Franco, but also Salazar, they're never, they're never, they're not in this period. Eventually his alienation of the military is going to cause problems for his successors, but it never gets bad enough while he's in power that they feel bold enough to try. In World War II, it becomes clearer as that kind of goes on and like Operation Barbarossa turns against the Germans. Everyone starts to realize like, Oh shit, Salazar probably had the right idea here. Fascism's not looking so hot, right? Germans, everyone starts to realize like, oh shit, Salazar probably had the right idea here.

Fascism's not looking so hot, right? All of Central Europe has been leveled by like allied bombing raids. Might have worked out really well for us that you kept out of this thing, huh? Your boy knew what was up. Yeah. I'm kind of glad we didn't send the Portuguese army to Stalingrad. And sort of while this is happening, Portugal is profiting from both sides of the war. He is an arch war profiteer and because he's never fully aligned, he's able to make really

good money from everyone. Per the New York Times, quote, the money came from Britain and the United States for the use of the Azores Islands as naval and air bases. At the same time, Lisbon was the spy center for the Axis as well as the allied powers with both of which Portugal traded. So they're trading with everyone, they're selling to everybody, and they wait until 43 to hand those islands over to the allies as naval and air bases, when it's pretty clear where things are going.

But they're profiteering from everyone. Now all of this does come at a personal cost for Salazar. Negotiating a middle way at the center of the largest war in human history is not simple, and this does age him. By 1945, he looks like he's much older than his years. And the victory of the USSR and the democratic nations spooks him initially, right? In 45, he's like, shit. Oh, did his hair turn gray because he thought he saw a ghost?

Yeah, he thought he saw, he thought he was- Like a Scooby-Doo character? Yeah, yeah, he thinks he's like fucked, right a Scooby-Doo character. Yeah. Yeah, he thinks he's like fucked right that like oh America and the Soviets won the left is going to rise worldwide in the wake of this and that's not going to be good for A guy like me who's a career Anti-communist and so he gets scared enough that in 1945 he'll he has an election and it's not a it's not a real election But he lets political parties besides his own party run again.

And he claims publicly that the election will be quote, as free as in free England. So how many times have you said that exact statement over the course of this show? Constantly, constantly. Whereas like the dictator had an election. Yeah, he has an election. It wasn't a real election, but he let people run. Yeah, did he kill the people that ran against him not immediately?

Lock some of them up and torture some of them, right? This isn't gonna last but there is this initial because he's kind of spooked. He doesn't want to push the allies too hard He doesn't want to seem like a fascist in this period. He's kind of scared He empowers a new set of special military courts to liberalize the policies of the political police. There's this concentration camp, Tarrafal, where the communists and these democratic activists are held, and he improves conditions.

He lets them talk to their families on the outside. He restores contact with what one inmate described as the living world in the post-war period for a little while. And for an article in the Journal of Music and Politics, Annabel Duarte writes, Portuguese fascism was quickly trying to make its political conversion.

It was trying to eliminate and make us forget the more conspicuous aspects that identified it with the dying regimes that had been its allies. And- I do like the idea of like, whoa, no. Whoa, whoa. Fascists, not me. It's just like this guy, we have field days in jail.

Fascism, I hardly know him. Yeah. In Portugal camps. It's like a camp camp, not a camp camp, Jesus. Camp camp camp. No, it's like camp, you know? You know, like, yeah. Right, exactly, it's nice.

So these changes are not entirely cosmetic, right? Things do get better for people in military prison for a while, not forever. But they don't presage this is not a legitimate change towards liberalism, right? He's not really introducing any more freedom. One major policy change that sounds good on paper is the political police can now only hold detainees without charges or a warrant for 180 days, right? So you can only keep people for six months without saying why you're doing it. Do that standing on my head. And this is not, yeah, you would have to in a Portuguese torture prison.

I'll tell you what, I'd come out with the tightest, strongest shoulders you could possibly imagine. Your fucking shoulders would be nuts, especially since- Oh my God. You're spending way longer than six months there. All that this law means- Honestly, that's a training camp. Yeah. That's what kind months there. Honestly, that's a training camp. Yeah.

That's what kind of camp it is. It's training camp. It's got to last a little longer than that because the only result of this policy is that every after six months, you release the prisoners and then as soon as they step outside the prison, you arrest them again for another six months, right? That's all you're doing. You're not actually letting anybody out here.

Now he does make a bar, right? Yeah, it's pretty dictator stuff. He does make one real concession. Although it's brief, which is that he allows the Movimento Unidad Democrática, which is like a democratic umbrella party to briefly start organizing and running candidates Now this is a broad coalition But even that proves to be too much for Salazar to allow. Within a few years, the Movimento starts to pick up steam and it becomes clear that there's enough leftist sentiment to present a threat to his regime. So in 1948, he outlaws the organization and calls it a communist front.

Now by 48, he's kind of, again, he's got these good instincts where he pretends to liberalize in the post-war period where there's this kind of surge in support for these kind of anti far right, pro-left ideas worldwide. And he gauges correctly that like, that's not gonna last. And by 48, the post-war danger posed by the victory of anti-fascism is over, right? The whole Cold War thing is starting to spin up.

There's now this kind of anti-leftist sentiment that is increasingly entrenched all over the quote unquote democratic world. Portugal gets admitted to NATO and Salazar's strong anti-communist credentials officially outlasted the brief period during which Americans had had to pretend that they considered the USSR an ally, right? He doesn't have to hold out long for us to be like, oh, this guy used to be Hitler's friend and Mussolini's friend, but he's an anti-communist. Isn't that all that really matters? We're trying to lock up as many anti-communists as we can to form this block against the USSR.

And so by 48, he's kind of held out long enough. There had been a lot of direct collaboration between the Nazi regime and Salazar's government and Mussolini's regime and Salazar's government, particularly within the political police. Salazar's intelligence network had constantly been in contact with Mussolini and Hitler's political police before and during the war. One of his top intel heads, Captain Agnostino Pereira, had collaborated with the Nazis as a private businessman trading tungsten during the war years, right? And he's going to be operating the torture prison system after the war, right?

This guy who had been, who was directly cribbing notes from the Gestapo and from the SD. In 1956, there's a huge wave of oppression that gets launched because by the mid fifties with the Cold War really going, Salazar's like, okay, it's time to get rid of all of these liberalizing policies. We can really lock in and start absolutely cracking down on the left and on any kind of like

pro-democratic organization and nobody in America or wherever is going to fuck with us, right? He passes a law in 56 that is meant to extend the incarceration periods among political prisoners to what is effectively a life sentence. And this is directly based off of a German act in 1935 that led to what's called the Schutthofz system, where detention time is unlimited for enemies of the state. So again, this ally of the Americans who have just beaten the Nazis is using

Nazi policies as the rubric for creating this sort of system in which to crack down on dissent and the U S is not only cool with it in 1957, we send the CIA to Portugal to help train his secret police. So they go straight from learning from the Nazis to working with the CIA. And part of what's happening here is that Salazar has lobbied the White House and been like, look, if I fall, Portuguese communism is obviously going to come roaring back, you know, so you guys need to send me some dudes to help my guys do torture. Duarte writes, a new period begins.

Special agents travel to elite training camps in the United States, such as Camp Peary, Virginia, also known as the farm, where they received instructions and methods and practices of interrogation from CIA experts. So great. Now he's a straight from the Nazis to us. I mean, I like that he's double dipping. Yeah. You know, he's just like, look, a lot of people have a lot of ideas. And I'm not going to say that they're all bad.

American fascists, German fascists, I'll take any fascist's idea about how to torture leftists. Yeah, he's like, can we make them stronger though? Yeah, and the CIA, again, like just the degree to which they are now playing a crucial role and specifically they're helping teach him how to use, we'll talk about this more later, auditory torture in order to really break people's minds in these torture prisons.

The CIA is taking notes from him. They introduced him to Van Halen. They invented Van Halen for this. This creates an extraordinary turning point in the situation. The fact that these CIA experts are coming in and they're training Portuguese people in the farm over in Virginia. There's now protests. There's a protest campaign that rises up from family members of prisoners who are angry

that their family members are being tortured so hideously, and they start protesting enough that the government has to take note of it. Again, it's not a complete totalitarian system. He can't totally ignore stuff like this. And 72 Portuguese lawyers from Lisbon, Porto, and other cities put out a comprehensive report on irregularities concerning the treatment of prisoners and deaths in the state prisons. Duarte writes, quote, Joaquim the most to Olivera, a barber and Democrat from FAAF, age 48 and Manuel de Silva, Jr., a worker and anti-fascist from Viana do Castelo, age 69,

for instance, had died inside a prison in Porto in 1957. Officially they had committed suicide. And what starts to leak out at this period is the degree to which these torture prisons have become institutionalized in Portugal. People find out that they're locking prisoners in these tiny cells called segredo, which have no natural light or even space to walk. You can only like really stand. You can't even fully lie down.

There's like a wooden board for a bed, but you can't even straighten your body out on the ground. People with money who are like middle-class can pay for a larger cell, but it's still a dungeon, right, and it's costing your family a significant amount of money every day. One political prisoner in 1956 left an account stating, for over a month he was locked in a wet cement cell without sufficient light or air. Then he was forced to pay the daily sum of ten escudos, for he was threatened with the

dungeons if he did not pay. So there's starting to be some resistance to this from like family members of people who are being held for a period of time. And some of this even leaks out internationally, but it's this thing where ultimately the anti-communist struggle is more, like it matters a lot more for every one of his backers

than the fact that he is using these techniques, like some of which we're teaching him, right? And there's this also handy thing where the CIA is like, well, we'll take notes on what he's doing, right? We'll like figure out what works so that when we start pushing to, you know, overthrow governments in Latin America, we can give them data on what works

in Salazar's prisons, right? He's like a laboratory for like like anti left wing crackdowns and operating secret police states. And that's kind of the role that he's playing internationally in this period of time. So that's cool. And it's really cool. Yeah, yeah, it's great. I love our role in this. Yeah, look at us.

It makes me feel good about the country. One of the things that the CIA really helps them lock down is their kind of use of the statue, this very like Portuguese torture technique where people are made to hold position for days or weeks at a time without sleeping while police shout in their ears and threaten them. This is billed legally as it's not torture,

it's a continuous investigation, right? They're constantly being interrogated for evidence about like terrorism. And so this is necessary for the security of the state. And they start increasingly using sound as a weapon, like where they'll play and like speakers like voices of other people like whispering or even like sounds from outside, sounds of people being tortured to like fuck with the heads of people who are locked in position, unable to like sleep or move for days at a time in order to make them go crazy. Right?

Like that's the purpose of this. And the CIA is helping them, right? We're taking notes on all of this and where some of this stuff winds up being part of the enhanced interrogation techniques we used after 9-11, like this is groundbreaking research in the field of how to torture people, which is part of why we're so interested in Salazar's regime, is he gives us a chance, he gives our torture guys a chance

to see what works to break people's brains. Pretty cool. Pretty cool stuff. I mean, cool is like, I know that cool, I know there's gonna be comments. Yeah. But you gotta remove yourself from the horrors. Mm-hmm.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. At least we know this stuff, right? It's always good to have data, you know, on what kind of torture works, on how long you can play Van Halen to somebody before their mind collapses, which is about nine minutes, at least from my listening to Van Halen.

Yeah. So Salazar's regime obviously is no less brutal after World War II than it had been before, but the man seemed different. He was treated different. Internationally, he's now an elder statesman, and he's feted around the world as like not, you know, he's a dictator, but he's a good dictator, right?

He kept Spain out of World War II, and he kept Portugal from falling to communism, right? So like he's the socially acceptable dictator, you know, in a lot of the West, right? Now, personally, as I said, he looks physically weaker after the war. He's kind of burnt out. And you do see, especially as the 50s wear into the 60s, he's tired and he's less careful than the younger version of himself had been. And these factors, he starts kind of slipping, this is going to lead him to embrace what would become a calamity for the sake of maintaining Portugal's doomed overseas empire, right? He's going to make his first really disastrously bad decision starting in the early 60s.

And we're going to talk about that, but you know who else made some bad decisions in the 60s? Like everyone. That's right. That's right. And we're going to talk about that, but you know who else made some bad decisions in the sixties? Like everyone. That's right. That's right. But particularly the sponsors of this podcast. Oh, wow. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases. But everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues and evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen, I was just like, ah, gotcha.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Authram, the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kelly Harnett spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit. I'm 100% innocent. — While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch.

— Because, oh, God, her and that jailhouse lawyer. — And as she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for the women locked up alongside her. — You're supposed to have faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her. — So many of these women had lived the same stories. — I said, were you a victim of domestic violence? And she was like, yeah. — But maybe Kelly could change the ending.

— I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals out of here? I'm gonna be the first one to do that. — This is the story of Kelly Harnett, a woman who spent 12 years fighting not just for her own freedom, but her girlfriends too. I think I have a mission from God to save souls by getting people out of prison. The girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So what happened at Chappaquiddick? Well, it really depends on who you talk to. There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond. And left a woman behind to drown. There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News. It's, Teddy escapes, blonde drowns. And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you.

The story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes. Will Ted become president? Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control. And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal. The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it. So is there a curse? Every week, we go behind the headlines

and beyond the drama of America's royal family. Listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. American history is full of wise people. Well women said something like, you know, 99.99% of war is diarrhea and 1% is glory. Those founding fathers were gossipy AF and they loved to cut each other down. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions

about American history and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer. Hamilton pauses and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. And Jefferson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said, it would have been harder to fake it than to do it. Listen to American history hotline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

So if you've ever looked at a map of Europe, you know that Portugal, not a big country. It's a little rectangle cut out of the Iberia. The fingernail of Europe. Right. It's like the fingernail of Europe. If like fucking Spain is the thumb, it's a fingernail. Right. And now in Salazar's day-

Oh, Spain is the thumb. It's the thumbnail. it's the thumbnail. Yeah, the thumbnail, thank you, sorry. Please, we are intellectuals on this show. We have to be accurate here. Now, most of Portuguese territory, most of what the government controls is not Portugal and it's not in Europe, right?

These are what are called euphemistically the overseas provinces, which is a term that's created to hide the fact that Portugal owns a lot of the rest of the world. Right. And it's really kind of silly at this point. Good for them, I guess. Yeah. Not going to be great for them in this period.

No. And to be fair, not good for the earth. No, no. But if their goal was to be a small little sliver on the planet and just start taking shit over, I mean mission accomplished temporarily. Yeah, I mean they're holding onto it for a long period of time, right? Believe it, achieve it. You know what I'm saying?

Folks, it's something you can take away from this episode. You can be a small little dumbass country and still get shit done. Yeah, at least for a while, up until the early 70s. Yeah. Now, Let's look at this as Instagram real energy where it's like, I have two kids and I still work out every day. Yeah. Yeah. What's your excuse? They're Instagram reeling colonialism, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And on a map, their situation looks pretty impressive in like the late 50s, early 60s, because they've held on to Portugal in this period owns modern day Angola and modern day Mozambique. And Mozambique alone is like nine times the size of Portugal, right? It's like much bigger. Not a small nation. Not a small country.

They also control Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome, Capo Verde, as well as, if you've ever been to India or heard of a place called Goa in India, which is like, it's kind of where Cytrance comes out of it. I've heard it referred to as like Russia's Mexico a lot. Like it's like a party town in a lot of ways. It's a major like tourist destination. It's like it's a big time tourist destination. Yeah. That's owned by Portugal up until the latter like third or third or so of the 20th century. That's Portuguese territory in the

middle of fucking India. Like Club Portugal. Yeah, it's like Club Portugal. And in order to maintain all these colonial possessions, Portugal has to keep a hundred thousand soldiers stationed mostly in Africa, but all over the world in order to keep in charge of these increasingly restive possessions, who after World War Two had started to be like, hey, a lot of anti-colonial movements are succeeding across the world, like Britain's given up India, why are we still part of Portugal? I feel like Angola's its own thing, what are we doing here, right?

And by the start of the 60s, the cost of repressing these constant movements for independence had grown precipitously. Portugal in the start of the 60s has the heaviest defense burden of any European nation. They are spending 40% of their annual budget to maintain control of these colonial possessions. Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of distance. It's a lot of distance. It's not cheap to hold onto this shit. I know they've got boats, but like boats are expensive. Boats cost money, an army costs money, a secret police force costs money.

They should've looked over to Spain and be like, hey, how'd that Armada thing work out for you? Yeah, did that keep you guys in power? Good for a while. Yeah, really good until it was very bad. Yeah. It was really good, and then it became, pardon the sailing reference,

an albatross around our necks. Yeah, a little bit of an albatross, yeah. So this is, and again, this is particularly ludicrous, that is the 60 start Portugal spending nearly half of their budget keeping control of these colonial possessions. Salazar is the fiscal conservative whose power rests on balancing the budget

and being rational about money. And everyone's like, okay, but is it really rational for us to own so much of Africa? And we're all we're not even really making money off of it, right? We're spending all our money holding on to it. Like what why does this make sense? Right? That's the concern It's like there's resources there Aren't you supposed to be like yeah during the resources is not like your whole thing It seems like this is nothing but negatives to us.

Although to be fair, I guess is salt really a thing you're fighting for in the 1900s? I feel like there's plenty of salt. We've got way too much salt, some people say. You can't wage a war for salt while McDonald's exists. No, no, exactly. Right? You can just get it real cheap. Yeah.

We've got so much salt now. We don't need any of this We should never have waits those wars. We've had too much salt. Yeah, it's we now know what it does to our heart, right? What if we'd never taken, you know any of these salt territories, you know Italians would live forever So the the Irrationalism of this stance of the fact that he's trying he's spending so much money to hold on to these possessions Not really making back What portugal's putting into it the irrationalism of this stance is key to understanding it because salazar He's been kind of almost like a robot up to this point

He seems like such a he's only making the nuts and bolts good financial decisions And he's gotten his reputation is based on he's like this cold-hearted accountant who doesn't fuck up, right? Um, and that falls away after this point. Alan Smith writing for the Journal of African History notes that Salazar has let himself become consumed by the quote, almost paranoid fear that foreigners were busily plotting to dismember the Portuguese Empire. And you have to see this as consistent with the logic that kept him out of World War II. Portugal's small and that small size is a vulnerability. And there he feels some protective effect as long as they have this

massive overseas empire that maybe that, that protects us from our small size of our main country, but even that feeling that this is keeping us safe is a delusion, right? There's also like a big wave of anti-colonial sentiment in the latter half of the 20th century. Like pretty, I mean, look at what England gave up. Yeah, everything. They're like, yeah, I guess we should probably cut it out.

But yeah, but we'll give up some of it, right? And this is- Okay, India, you can be India again. This is a problem for Portugal in that he has previously, he'd been so good at seeing where the wind was blowing and like, ah, you know what? I'm not going to back the fascists fully in World War II because I just don't think

they're gonna have staying power, right? And in this, and right after the war, he's like, I'm gonna liberalize on paper. Because like- Pick buying crypto. Right, right? And in this, and right after the war, he's like, I'm gonna liberalize on paper. Because like it's- He's buying crypto. Right, right. He's good, he's been good at buying and selling at the right times.

And he is buying into colonialism at exactly the wrong time, right? He normally is really good at seeing a scam. Yeah, and he's just, he's kind of passed his prime here, right? I think that's a big part of what's going on. Now, all colonial powers are propped up in this in the periods before by fantasies, right?

The British hold on to what they hold on to as long as they do, because they've got this need to believe they've still, they haven't given up the empire entirely, right? We still have some fragment of this thing that made us great. The French in this period cling to a policy known as Franc Afrique, in which they granted

their French speaking African colonies a degree of autonomy while maintaining ultimate control themselves and acting as Boba Karr-Diop wrote for the new African as absentee landlords, right? Where they're like, well, we'll let them be independent on paper, but these are French speaking countries. And so we ultimately exercise power.

And this is a delusion for France to all of these are delusions. And now we're going to talk about what was Portugal's delusion that backed up their colonial ideology in the Salazar period, right? Cause early on when you're taking all this shit, you don't need to back it up by anything other than like we're Christian, they're not, we've got guns. They don't. Come on, look at our skin color. Don't be weird about it.

In the late 20th century, Portugal has to find a way to like justify why they're holding on to this shit. And they actually try to do it by being like, actually, we're anti-racist and we're the only colonial power that is. So the delusion that they latch onto is- The bold strategy cotton, let's see if it pays off for- Yeah, let's see how well this works in the long run. The strategy Salazar's regime is going to buy into is inspired by the work of a Brazilian

sociologist named Gilberto Freire. And Salazar's regime buys hook, line and sinker into this racial pseudoscientific theory that Freire comes up with called Lusotropicalism. He saw that and went, that's Brazilian. That's Brazilian, yes. They argue, Lusotropicalism is this idea that number one, Portuguese people are uniquely well suited to like these tropical and like warmer climates that they're colonializing in.

So number one, we are fit to survive in these places we're running, unlike the British, right? And number two, we've come up with the only system of colonialism that's actually good for colonized people because we're not racist, right? Unlike the British and French, Portuguese colonizers didn't consider themselves superior to the people they ruled. And the evidence for this is that they fucked them

and had kids with them, right? Like we're cool with mixed race kids, right? Like that's what makes us not racist, right? We're breeding with them. We're not bigoted the same way all of these other Europeans are, right? Somebody should have given them an American history textbook.

Yeah, yeah, boy. Or like any colonial history textbook, right? Portugal is not special and they're no less racist than anyone else. But that's what Lusotropicalism is. The idea that Portuguese colonialism is unique and special and thus defensible. They might be slightly less racist than other people. They're probably a little less racist than Hitler.

Yeah, they're less racist than Hitler. Not a high bar, right? Yeah, I know. Yeah, sure. We've brought him up. It would be a shame to just forget him. I'll say they clear that bar. Right. I am going to quote per an article on Lusotropicalism for Genocide Watch by Nat Hill, quote,

Lusotropicalism became the defining ideology of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's pseudo fascist regime in Portugal following the Second World War. As European powers increasingly sought to rid themselves of their colonial territories, Portugal under Salazar refused to consider granting its African colonies independence or autonomy, calling them the overseas provinces instead of colonies. Emelcar Cabral, the founder and leader of the PAIGC in Portuguese Guinea, spoke about how the regime used Lusotropicalism in their colonial dogma. A whole mythology was assembled, and as with other myths,

especially those considering the subjection and exploitation of peoples, there was no lack of men of science, even renowned sociologists, to provide a theoretical basis, in this case, Lusotropicalismo. Gilberto Freire transformed all of us who lived in the provinces of Portugal into the fortunate inhabitants of a Lusotropical paradise.

So instead of, these are people we're ruling, these people are really lucky because we know how to actually take care of them. And that makes us fine. We're different. We're better than everyone. We're not like other boys. We're not like the other colonial powers, right?

So now the reality is that there's nothing different about Portuguese colonialism. It is based- I mean, it's a good, it's a swing. It's a good attempt at a branding, right? Yeah. But Portuguese colonialism is like all colonialism, based on mass resource extraction and forced labor, right?

Human trafficking had been the core of Portugal's colonial ambitions since the 1400s, when the first West African people were captured, taken to Portugal and sold into slavery in Lagos. Geovane Effect documents in an article for Global Voices, quote, First West African people were captured, taken to Portugal, and sold into slavery in Lagos. Geovane Effect documents in an article for Global Voices quote, Among the colonial powers that emerged over the centuries of European colonialism, Portugal trafficked the most enslaved people.

No one else did as much human trafficking in the colonial era as Portugal. They are top dog, right? And they've got their defenders even to the modern day who will claim that like, no, we weren't as bad as the other ass dog, right? And they've got their defenders even to the modern day who will claim that like, no, we weren't as bad as the other assholes, right? Obviously starting with that off, there's this often reported claim that Portugal was like the first European country to ban slavery in 1761.

And this is a lie, right? That year, Portugal banned the importation of slaves into one city, but they continued to be the primary global transporter of the transatlantic slave trade until 1850. And that Global Voices article has a graph we'll put up in video form that makes it clear how much transatlantic slave trading is being done by Portugal, right? Like Portugal is the light green in this document, and every period from 1501 up to 1850, they are by far the majority of

the transatlantic slave trafficking, right? From 1801 to 1850, the Netherlands traffics about 568,000 people and the UK and France traffics smaller numbers than that. And Portugal is responsible for almost two and a half million people being trafficked. Oh, Portugal don't do that. Yeah, bad, bad, bad. No, spraying with the water bottle.

Now, the transatlantic slave trade obviously ends kind of in the middle of the 1800s, but that doesn't stop Portugal from utilizing forced labor, right? They just change it. They alter it. You're no longer trafficking people in the same way, but you are still forcing people

to work for you and you're just dressing it up as like, well, these people were arrested for this purpose, right? In 1929, a civil and criminal political statute for the indigenous peoples of the colonies in Mozambique and Angola was established, which laid out that native people could not be assigned rights related to constitutional institutions. This forced segregation remained the law of the land

throughout the period of Salazar's Estado Novo. Even though he's saying, no, no, no, we're Lusotropicalists, right? We're the ones who aren't racist. But also indigenous peoples in Africa are not allowed to have constitutional rights, you know? And also we did a lot of slave stuff. We did a lot of slave stuff and we do not feel bad about it.

We borrowed the 13th Amendment. Yeah. Now, they make some mild concessions to changing international opinion during Salazar's term, but these are, again, minimal. In 1953, a law for governing Portuguese colonies ends the use of the term colonial empire. So they stop, we're not going to call ourselves an empire in the 50s, but we're gonna keep using forced labor. That will continue to be legal. And this new law notes that the state, quote, can only compel indigenous people to work in public works

of general interest to the community, an occupation whose results belong to them in the execution of judicial decisions of a criminal nature or to comply with tax obligations. So we can't sell slaves, but if you're making something that's good for you, we can make you do that work. Or if you get in criminal trouble, or if you owe money for taxes, then we can

force you to labor for the state. Right? Totally different. Much less evil. Obviously. Obviously way better. Now, the number one purpose of Portugal's colonial empire under Salazar is the same as it had always been for Portugal, which is exploiting forced labor.

As the financial drain for supporting the empire grew greater, Salazar pushed to increase the tax burden on Portugal's colonies to pay for military deployments and the ever-increasing foreign staff needed to keep things going. He pushes an aggressive pension scheme that destroys the foreign cash reserves in Mozambique and other African colonies, which makes it impossible for them to act independently because they have no foreign currency to do so with. He also pushes aggressive tariffs that make it painful to import or trade anything from countries other than Portugal.

Alan Smith writes, foreign transfers were first made available to those firms doing business with the mother country. Exchange for purchases from other markets could only be obtained after these transactions had been completed, and only if the dealings with Portugal had not exhausted the available reserves. The result of this policy was that the colonies were often well supplied with unnecessary commodities from Portugal, while starving for essentials which could only be obtained from elsewhere. There can be no doubt that sellers are placed great importance on the establishment and maintenance of this system

Right that like you're you don't have everything you need because you'd have to buy that from England or whoever But you've got all this shit you don't need because it's something we make in Portugal and we don't make a lot, right? No, yeah No They make a delicious seafood dish. And this is also bad for the overall Portuguese economy because he is banning, there's not a lot of Portuguese companies that can take advantage of all of the resources in Mozambique and Angola and these other possessions.

And he's banning international companies from investing in these colonies because he's scared that then their mother countries will take over, right? Which is increasing the overall burden on Portugal and the overall burden on the government because there's less and less money to be made doing this shit. Now while all this is happening and he is focused obsessively on maintaining this colonial empire and this is an obsession for a lot of folks in the ruling class, Portuguese citizens don't give a shit. They're barely aware of the fact that this is going on.

Events in the colonies don't make the news and Salazar's policies make sure that the country never realizes a lot of massive material gain from all of these possessions. These same policies that are meant to ensure her dominance in Mozambique and Angola, like make it just not worth it for the regular people. So they don't really see why are we doing this?

A lot of shit comes to a head. That's fair. They're like, hey, we're not doing great. This isn't helping us at all. Why are we doing this? Yeah. You won't even let us legalize heroin yet. Yeah, come on, man.

Yeah, that's gonna wait a couple of decades. So in 1961, that's the most disastrous year for Salazar's dictatorship since its founding. All these simmering colonial conflicts across Portuguese possessions burst onto the main stage. The UPA, which is a liberation organization in Angola, launches a series of attacks on white settler properties in northern Angola, killing several Portuguese civilians. And the month before that, the MPLA, a Marxist group, had attacked the Luanda prison, killing

seven guards. So you have these very public terrorists, they call them terrorist attacks. And Salazar, his control over the media allows him to depict these explosions as, in the words of one paper, coming from the exterior that tries to disturb the lives of white and black people in the peaceful land of Angola. They're outside agitators, right?

And it's like there's some sort of playbook that exists. It's like, it's always the same fucking playbook. And he claims that like, all we're trying to do is keep things nice for all of our white and black citizens who we all love equally, right? But any claims to enlightened racial attitudes by this Luso tropicalist regime are discarded at this point. As this article by Julia Garayo

for the journal Violence Against Women summarizes. The massacres of white settlers and their workers in northern Angola in 1961, the events that according to the Portuguese government triggered the war, were exhaustively photographed by embedded journalists and army officers. Photos of the corpses of raped white women and dead babies were reproduced in the national media. The Lisbon Society of Geography organized an exhibition

to expose the selection of the pictures to the public, which was quite successful. The wide circulation- And they're eating the dogs. Yeah, they're eating the dogs, the dog eaters. The wide circulation of these pictures in Portugal was intended to justify the deployment of troops abroad and delegitimize anti-colonial movements and communism. The Portuguese ambassador to the United Nations

used the images to denounce the savagery of terrorists who crossed the northern border of Angola to behead, rape, and mutilate our women. These images, where the white woman's body symbolizes white innocence threatened by African savagery, functioned to construct a retaliatory narrative of Portuguese wartime victimhood. As a call to arms embedded in incendiary words, their circulation was intended to prevent any empathy with anti-colonial movements and hence legitimize any form of violence employed against them. Tale as old as time.

Bae, we know. Yeah, we've seen it. We know what's happening. We've seen it now. Right, yeah, it continues to happen. You never change the playbook because it works pretty well for a while. People are real fucking dumb. Yeah, people are dumb. I don't know if you've changed the playbook because it works pretty well for a while. Well, people are real fucking dumb. Yeah. People are dumb.

I don't know if you've met the population. What a bunch of fucking dunces. It's never, it doesn't work in the long run though, right? Because this is impossible to contain and it's impossible to hold on to these possessions when you get increasingly authoritarian. Right. It's a stop gap. So unrest continues throughout the year and Salazar gets increasingly desperate to contain

it. He tries, he extends Portuguese citizenship across the colonial populations. It's kind of like, look, you're citizens now. But his primary tactic is violence and sexualized violence against white women is used as a justification for this expensive and violent military response. And in the same vein, sexualized violence against Angolans becomes a popular tactic of the military. For the next decade, as the Portuguese colonial war wears on, African women are systematically

raped by Portuguese occupying soldiers. Obviously, this doesn't stop people from being angry at Portugal. The fire only spreads. And it moves out from Angola. As Portuguese weakness has made manifest, they lose more and more of Salazar's prized possessions. Goa, which had been Portuguese property for 400 years, is taken by a newly independent India in December of 1961.

Yeah, they took Goa. We were just gonna party there. Yeah, now we're not gonna get credit for it. Well, I mean, we'll get a lot of credit. We're gonna go to Spring Break there. Yeah, so Sal're not gonna get credit for it. Well, I mean Yeah, so Salazar orders his men who are surrounded in the middle of India to fight to the death But his own governor general is like nah, I don't think we can win this one. Yeah, we're gonna do that man Yeah, no. No, thank you. You're you're all the way at Lisbon, man

You don't know how surrounded, how big India is. I don't know if you've seen, can we get this guy a map? There's like 80 guys here. What are you talking about? Didn't you go to school? So the truth of this situation cannot be allowed to get out to the populace. Salazar's minister of the army declared,

"'We are today and will be tomorrow in India and Africa, "'as long live the eternal Portugal." So that's not how things are going to work out, but for a while at least, Salazar's secret police and this repression regime he's built sweep into action in Lisbon, right? We can at least pretend things are good in Lisbon. And to get some context about what life is like in Lisbon during this period of time, I want to read you parts of an article by Dennis Redmond. And Redmond was an AP reporter stationed in Lisbon.

Perhaps Rodman. Rodman. An AP reporter stationed in Lisbon from 65 to 67. And he covers the Portuguese colonial war extensively as well as this like rising youth movement against the war. In 1966, and in 66, more drafted Portuguese soldiers die in their colonial possessions than Americans die in Vietnam. That's the scale of problem this is for Portugal. That year, Heath publishes several articles about the disastrous conduct of the military during

what had become a hopeless conflict. These articles began to spread amongst student protesters and earned him the attention of Salazar's PIDE, which is what the secret police is called now. He writes in an article for Politico, my mail was steamed open. My phone conversations were meticulously recorded and translated. A squad of eight goons tried to grab me on happiness square at my Associated Press Office in Lisbon before I found refuge at the US Embassy. Later I was personally interrogated by the head of Portugal's political police, which had assassinated some of its opponents,

jailed and tortured others. The dossier contained the telix reports I had sent out into the world, reports of university students being mistreated by political police because of their struggle for greater freedom and democracy. Censorship was so prevalent, the government designated minders to every local newspaper

who excised any reference to student unrest or guerrilla warfare in Africa and even flagged any literary articles deemed unfavorable to the regime. And one of the things this guy notes is that none of the local press is useful, but the regime is not totalitarian enough that you can't buy foreign. There's always foreign newspapers available at the market in Lisbon, right? Even if they have to be smuggled in. So people are still able to figure out how badly the overseas war is going,

and unrest is just building and building as the PIDE is getting more and more violent to crack down on things. Duarte summarizes this crackdown in her article, quote, on April 21st, 1965, Maria Matos was arrested for activities against the security of the state. She was stripped naked and beaten by male and female agents. By the third day of torture without sleeping, she began to have hallucinations, spiders in the legs of a table, walls moving, and heard piercing screams of people being tortured. At the end of the episode, an agent started shooting pictures and a young male agent hummed

a typical Portuguese Catholic song in honor of the Virgin Mary, entitled On the Thirteenth of May. The intention is clear, to humiliate and taunt the victim, taking advantage of the religious connotations of the song to mock her for being a communist and an atheist. In 1973, another prisoner, Pedro Baptista, suffered the statue torture for a week and heard sounds of protest songs, serenades, and photos outside the prison. At first he thought they were an action of solidarity because of his situation, but he later concluded that they were an assemblage of pre-recorded sounds. So their shoulders were shredded, jacked.

But also what you see here they're doing is like they're playing fake protest music to prisoners to make them think that their friends are out there, that like the revolution is gaining steam. And that's a play, right? There's not actually anything going on outside of the prison. And when people realize that, it kind of breaks them further. Even though the regime is weakening in this period. It's not cool that they did that, but that's a good move.

It's a smart move. It works for a little while, like all of this stuff. Now one of Salazar's big calls in the late 60s is to ally with Rhodesia. He becomes like one of the few countries that will recognize the white supremacist regime there when it's fighting its losing war in order to maintain this white supremacist state. And they provide, they really allow Rhodesia to extend their time and power by giving them access to international markets. Rhodesia can sell goods to Mozambique and will export Rhodesian goods through Mozambique,

which does extend the brutal colonial war in Rhodesia by a period of time. None of this though is enough to stop the winds of change blowing through Africa, nor is it enough to stop the ravages of time from impacting Salazar. In 1968, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, which may have happened when he fell from Nor is it enough to stop the ravages of time from impacting Salazar in 1968 He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage which may have happened when he fell from a chair or in the bath, right? Either way he declines rapidly and he has to be put into a coma Now naturally if he's in a coma, he can't be the dictator anymore So his subordinates take over and they stop me. I believe you've never seen the movie Dave. Yeah

Is that what Dave's about? You gotta get a Portuguese Sigourney Weaver in there, and then you gotta just find another guy that looks just like him. That's actually what they do. So this is very funny. That's literally the plot of Dave. He comes out of his coma after a month,

and these guys who have been running things while he's been in the coma are like, he's too old. Let's just lie. So they pretend he's still running the country and he gets to like sign paperwork and give out orders. And everyone's just like, this is definitely what's happening.

You're too sick to leave, right? You're still in charge, absolutely. And so for the last two years of his life, Salazar has no power, but he believes he's running the country because they're just pretending. Right. Well, they're doing things for him. It's like the sad end of a movie that takes place in like Elizabethan England or. Yeah. Yeah.

Where they're just like faking. Yeah. Yeah, buddy. You're still running things. Absolutely. Like, why don't you sign some more documents? Don't go outside. Yeah. It's like like like a crazy guy in a Napoleon hat. Yeah. Moving pieces across the map. Well, they're like, okay, we've, we're still holding on to all of that really well. That's like a really funny thing to have happen in the age where like T is around.

He's like a reverse weakened at Bernie's where he's still alive technically, but yeah, so he continues to believe he's in charge until his death on July 27th of 1970. His successors try to hold things together, but the calamitous colonial wars had brought a cadre of leftist military officers who are really unhappy with how the government's working. And in April of 1974, they launched the mostly peaceful Carnation Revolution, which overthrows the regime and returns democracy to Portugal. And that's where, you know, there's more going on in Portuguese politics since then than just that. But like, that's how the dictatorship ends. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. I would also like to add that this is a man that had two days of mourning for Hitler. Yeah. Yeah. This is this this is the guy who's, yeah, like, really bummed about that. Yeah. yeah, this is this this is the guy who's yeah, like really bummed about that. Yeah, and you know, people will say part of why democracy is kind of able to like reform relatively easily and more successfully than a lot of areas in the wake of the dictatorship is he never completely eliminated all of the like trappings of democracy. So there were these institutions that continued to exist under him that it's just a matter of letting them

have actual power again. But it's also not like he was overthrown, really. No, no. I know the Carnation Revolution's gonna be happening. Yes, that happened in 74, and yeah, that is an overthrowing, but it's not, there's not a fighting, right? But if you're like, oh, can you believe he outplayed himself? It's like, I don't know, man. He just went into a coma.

Yeah, he kind of won, unfortunately. He just ended by being dead. Yeah. Yeah. He lives out his fucking days, right? He fucking, he did it. Yeah, he does. The only win we kind of get against him is he's aware the colonial empire is collapsing, right? You know, he's he's not he's not unaware of the fact that this isn't working as well as he wants it to But he he never really sees That it's it's fallen. Oh, he never really lives for everything to collapse entirely

He doesn't see portugal having a life without him, which is probably mostly what he wanted, right? Yeah, he's like you guys can't live without me. Yeah. Like we can and we will. Yeah, they'll do just fine. But unfortunately, yeah. A bummer. Thanks for the balanced budget. Yeah. Anyway, that's the story of Salazar. Kind of a dick. Yeah. Kind of a dick. Not a nice man. I'm going to go on a limb and say this guy may be a bit of a no good Nick. Maybe a douche. Yeah.

Maybe sucked. Um, but pretty good at being a dictator. Unfortunately on a technical level, again, he gets that Oscar. Good for him. Good for him. Well, Jeff, on a technical level, do you want to plug any of your plugables here? I have a lot of stuff, folks. I do really cool stuff.

My name's Jeff May and, uh, he's Google Jeff May podcast if you want, but I have Jeff has cool over at patreon.com slash Jeff may, I have, um, shows like Jeff has cool friends, nerd and nerd, which ended up going for free. Um, but those both, um, you know, get early access on sensitive. So the whole, the, the Patreon benefits, right? both, um, you know, get early access on sensitive. So the whole, the, the Patreon benefits, right? I also do an, uh, a show called, uh, the monthly flow of Andrea Gazetta. I also do, uh, Tom and Jeff watch Batman with game, uh, gamefully unemployed network. I do, uh, all the stuff on the, uh, you don't even like this network with Adam Todd Brown. And, uh, I have a great, great, uh, channel

on YouTube called Jeff has cool cards where I open trading cards on camera and like, oh, that's neat. And people like that and I do. And then I mailed them out to my patrons cause that's nice. I run a standup comedy show the second Friday of every month that blasts in the past on Magnolia in Burbank, California.

So come check that out. And I'm on the socials. Check him out. Hey there Jeff variations of that yeah, yeah excellent well everybody this has been behind the bastards a Podcast that you've just listened to and now you'll listen to more of it. You know now you'll listen to more of it Yeah, keep doing it keep listening and we'll keep telling you about guys who sucked Keep doing it, keep listening, and we'll keep telling you about guys who sucked. Sometimes in Portugal, sometimes in other places. Sometimes a lady that sucks.

It's occasionally a lady. Yeah, we get ladies on this show every now and then. A sucky lady every once in a while. A couple of them, a couple of them. A Bathory showing up every once in a while. Women out there, if you want to be on Behind the Bastards, take over a country and kill hundreds of thousands of people. Create know, create your own torture police. You know, women have been strong. They're stronger than ever.

That's right. You know what? Initiative ladies, you got to dictate. Yeah, just just murder. Get people to inject bleach into their children, you know, you can do it. I believe in you. No, the podcast's over. No, I was with you, but no. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.

New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. Ugh, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech? Upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Ultra light, ultra powerful, and built for serious productivity. With Intel Core Ultra processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance

that keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join iHeartRadio and Sarah Spain in celebrating the one year anniversary of iHeart Women's Sports. With powerful interviews and insider analysis,

our shows have connected fans with the heart of women's sports. In just one year, the network has launched 15 shows and built a community united by passion. Podcasts that amplify the voices of women in sports. Thank you for supporting iHeart Women's Sports and our founding sponsors, Elf Beauty, Capital One, and Novartis.

Just open the free iHeart app and search iHeart Women's Sports and our founding sponsors, Elf Beauty, Capital One, and Novartis. Just open the free iHeart app and search iHeart Women's Sports to listen now. I'm Ian Faff, the creator and host of the Uncle Chris podcast. My Uncle Chris was a real character, a garbage truck driver from South Carolina who is now buried in Panama City alongside the founding families of Panama.

He also happens to be responsible for the craziest night of my life. Wild stories about adventure, romance, crime, history, and war intertwine as I share the tall tales and hard truths that have helped me understand Uncle Chris. Listen now to Uncle Chris on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.