El Salvador wants to be a bitcoin paradise
Explicit content warning
07/16/21 • 17 min
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This year, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele made his country the first in the world to embrace bitcoin as legal tender. That means that come September, Salvadorans will be able to pay bills and taxes in bitcoin and that all businesses will be required to accept the digital currency — from McDonald's to the fruit vendor on the corner.
Today, L.A. Times Latin America correspondent Kate Linthicum explains how El Salvador got into the cryptocurrency game.
More reading:
How a California surfer helped bring bitcoin to El Salvador
El Salvador makes bitcoin legal tender
A look at El Salvador’s meme-loving, press-hating autocratic president
This year, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele made his country the first in the world to embrace bitcoin as legal tender. That means that come September, Salvadorans will be able to pay bills and taxes in bitcoin and that all businesses will be required to accept the digital currency — from McDonald's to the fruit vendor on the corner.
Today, L.A. Times Latin America correspondent Kate Linthicum explains how El Salvador got into the cryptocurrency game.
More reading:
How a California surfer helped bring bitcoin to El Salvador
El Salvador makes bitcoin legal tender
A look at El Salvador’s meme-loving, press-hating autocratic president
Previous Episode
Eugenics in our own backyard
For a century, California sterilized women in its prisons and hospitals, often without their consent. Government officials did it in the name of eugenics — of trying to curtail the number of working-class people and people of color. The Golden State apologized for its actions in 2003 but didn’t ban the practice until 2014. Now the state will try to address the wrong of its forced sterilization program with a historic move: It wants to pay survivors reparations.
On today's episode, we speak with Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles), who sponsored the legislative bill that will create California’s reparations effort. And we also talk to one of the activists who have brought this dark chapter in American history to the public.
More reading:
California poised to pay compensation to victims of forced sterilization
Editorial: Paying $25,000 to every living forced-sterilization victim is the least California can do
Next Episode
Introducing 'Battle of 187' week!
This week, we’re re-airing "This is California: The Battle of 187," a four-part podcast the L.A. Times did back in 2019 in collaboration with Futuro Studios (and we'll wrap up the week with a brand-new update). The series is about Proposition 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants but instead ended up radicalizing a generation of Latinos — and set the stage for Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2016 on a xenophobic platform.
Today, in Part One of "This is California: The Battle of 187," we take you back to a time when the Golden State wasn’t a progressive paradise — and how Republicans decided that undocumented immigrants were California’s true problem and thus needed to be demonized.
More reading:
Initiative to deny aid and education to illegal immigrants qualifies for ballot
Prop. 187 creators come under closer scrutiny
The Times Poll: Anti-illegal immigration Prop. 187 keeps 2-to-1 edge
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