B1 · Intermediate
12 min
politicscivil rightslawhistoryunited states
El Cazador Cazado: El gobierno de Trump acusa al SPLC
The Hunter Hunted: The Trump DOJ Indicts the SPLC
Fletcher breaks down this story in English. Octavio reacts and expands in Spanish. Follow along with the live transcript, tap any word for its translation. Intermediate level — perfect for intermediate learners expanding their range.
So here is a sentence I did not expect to say in 2026.
The United States Department of Justice has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the most prominent civil rights organizations in American history, on fraud charges.
Bueno, mira, la acusación dice que el SPLC pagó a personas dentro de grupos supremacistas blancos, como el Ku Klux Klan y las Naciones Arias, para obtener información.
Well, look, the indictment says that the SPLC paid people inside white supremacist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, to get information.
Y el gobierno dice que eso fue fraude.
And the government says that was fraud.
Right, so they paid informants inside hate groups, which is something the FBI has done for decades, and somehow that becomes a fraud charge when a civil rights organization does it.
I want to sit with that for a moment.
Es que la acusación específica es que el SPLC recibió donaciones y dijo a los donantes que el dinero era para otras cosas.
The specific accusation is that the SPLC received donations and told donors the money was for other things.
Para el gobierno, eso es el fraude, no el pago a los informantes.
For the government, that is the fraud, not the payment to informants.
Okay.
So the legal theory is about donor deception, not about the infiltration itself.
That is an important distinction.
But let me back up, because I think a lot of people outside the U.S.
need context on what the SPLC actually is.
A ver, el SPLC, el Centro de Derecho para la Pobreza del Sur, empezó en 1971 en Alabama.
Look, the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, started in 1971 in Alabama.
Dos abogados lo fundaron para defender los derechos civiles de personas pobres en el sur de Estados Unidos.
Two lawyers founded it to defend the civil rights of poor people in the American South.
Morris Dees and Joe Levin.
And what made the SPLC famous, genuinely famous, was a legal strategy that almost nobody was using at the time.
They went after the Klan not through criminal law, but through civil lawsuits.
They bankrupted them.
Sí, en los años ochenta, el SPLC ganó casos muy importantes.
Yes, in the eighties, the SPLC won very important cases.
Después de un crimen del KKK, el SPLC demandó a la organización en un tribunal civil y ganó millones de dólares.
After a KKK crime, the SPLC sued the organization in a civil court and won millions of dollars.
El Klan no tuvo dinero para continuar.
The Klan had no money to continue.
That 1987 case, Beulah Mae Donald versus the United Klans of America, was a landmark.
They won seven million dollars, which effectively destroyed that branch of the Klan.
It was a genuinely brilliant piece of legal strategy.
Y el SPLC también creó una lista de grupos de odio en Estados Unidos.
And the SPLC also created a list of hate groups in the United States.
Esta lista fue muy importante porque los medios de comunicación y el gobierno la usaron como referencia durante muchos años.
This list was very important because the media and the government used it as a reference for many years.
The Hate Map, they called it.
And look, I covered some of these groups as a journalist.
When you needed to know whether an organization had a documented history of extremism, the SPLC database was where reporters went first.
Bueno, pero el SPLC también tuvo problemas internos.
Well, but the SPLC also had internal problems.
En 2019, la organización despidió a Morris Dees, el fundador, después de acusaciones de conducta inapropiada con empleados.
In 2019, the organization fired Morris Dees, the founder, after accusations of inappropriate conduct with employees.
Fue un escándalo grande.
It was a big scandal.
And that scandal opened a door that critics on both the left and the right walked through.
There were people inside the SPLC who said the organization had become more interested in fundraising than in actual civil rights work.
That is a serious charge.
La verdad es que el SPLC tenía cientos de millones de dólares en sus cuentas.
The truth is that the SPLC had hundreds of millions of dollars in its accounts.
Algunos críticos dijeron que la organización usaba el miedo para recibir donaciones, pero no gastaba el dinero correctamente.
Some critics said the organization used fear to receive donations, but did not spend the money correctly.
Here is where it gets complicated, though.
Some of those critics were on the right, and they were targeting the SPLC because it put their organizations on the hate list.
So you have to be careful about the source of the criticism.
Sí, claro.
Yes, of course.
Pero también hubo críticos de izquierda, y periodistas independientes, que encontraron problemas reales.
But there were also critics from the left, and independent journalists, who found real problems.
No todos los críticos tenían motivos políticos.
Not all critics had political motives.
No, you are absolutely right about that.
So the SPLC walked into this moment already weakened, already controversial.
And then the Trump Justice Department pulls this trigger.
Mira, el contexto político es muy importante aquí.
Look, the political context is very important here.
El Departamento de Justicia de Trump ya atacó otras organizaciones de derechos civiles.
Trump's Justice Department has already attacked other civil rights organizations.
No es una coincidencia que eligieron al SPLC ahora.
It is not a coincidence that they chose the SPLC now.
I spent years in countries where governments used legal mechanisms to destroy civil society organizations they did not like.
You charge them with financial crimes, you freeze their accounts, and suddenly they cannot function.
The substance of the charge matters less than the effect.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
En España también vimos esto.
In Spain we also saw this.
Cuando un gobierno quiere destruir una organización, busca un problema financiero.
When a government wants to destroy an organization, it looks for a financial problem.
Es una estrategia muy antigua.
It is a very old strategy.
Now, the three million dollars.
The DOJ says the SPLC paid roughly three million dollars to infiltrate white supremacist groups, including the KKK, Aryan Nations, and the American Nazi Party.
And the allegation is that donors were not told this was how their money was being used.
A ver, pagar a personas para infiltrar un grupo peligroso es algo que los servicios de inteligencia hacen constantemente.
Look, paying people to infiltrate a dangerous group is something intelligence services do constantly.
El FBI pagó a informantes dentro del KKK durante décadas.
The FBI paid informants inside the KKK for decades.
Nadie los acusó de fraude.
Nobody accused them of fraud.
And here is the extraordinary thing, the really extraordinary thing.
The FBI under COINTELPRO did not just infiltrate these groups.
They infiltrated civil rights groups too.
They put informants inside Martin Luther King's organization.
Inside the NAACP.
Bueno, eso es exactamente la ironía histórica.
Well, that is exactly the historical irony.
Durante muchos años, el gobierno de Estados Unidos usó agentes secretos para destruir organizaciones de derechos civiles.
For many years, the U.S.
Y ahora acusa a una organización de derechos civiles por hacer lo mismo contra grupos racistas.
government used secret agents to destroy civil rights organizations.
The government spent decades spying on the people fighting for civil rights, and now it is prosecuting the people who were spying on the people fighting against civil rights.
There is a kind of dark symmetry in that.
Es que la historia de las infiltraciones en Estados Unidos es muy larga y complicada.
The history of infiltrations in the United States is very long and complicated.
Después de COINTELPRO, el Congreso hizo nuevas reglas para limitar el poder del FBI.
After COINTELPRO, Congress made new rules to limit the power of the FBI.
Pero las organizaciones privadas no tenían las mismas limitaciones.
But private organizations did not have the same limitations.
Right, so the SPLC was operating in a legal gray area that the government itself created.
The FBI could not do certain things anymore after the Church Committee reforms in the 1970s.
Private organizations could.
Y durante los años ochenta y noventa, los grupos supremacistas blancos eran muy activos y muy peligrosos.
And during the eighties and nineties, white supremacist groups were very active and very dangerous.
Hubo muchos ataques, muchos crímenes.
There were many attacks, many crimes.
Alguien necesitaba información sobre estas organizaciones.
Someone needed information about these organizations.
The Oklahoma City bombing was 1995.
The Atlanta Olympics bombing was 1996.
These were not hypothetical threats.
The people the SPLC was watching were capable of mass violence, and the federal government was not always on top of it.
Mira, yo recuerdo el atentado de Oklahoma.
Look, I remember the Oklahoma bombing.
En España también tuvimos terrorismo en esos años, con ETA.
In Spain we also had terrorism in those years, with ETA.
Y yo entiendo que a veces las organizaciones necesitan métodos que no son perfectamente legales para proteger a las personas.
And I understand that sometimes organizations need methods that are not perfectly legal to protect people.
That is a genuinely interesting comparison.
ETA was a completely different political context, obviously, but the question of what a civil society organization can do to combat violent extremism, that is universal.
La verdad es que en España, las organizaciones de derechos civiles no infiltraron grupos terroristas.
The truth is that in Spain, civil rights organizations did not infiltrate terrorist groups.
Eso era trabajo de la policía y de los servicios secretos.
That was the work of the police and intelligence services.
Pero el sistema en Estados Unidos es diferente.
But the system in the United States is different.
The U.S.
has a much stronger tradition of private organizations doing work that in other countries would be purely governmental.
The ACLU litigating constitutional cases.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The SPLC.
These are not government agencies, but they function almost like one in some areas.
Y eso crea un problema.
And that creates a problem.
Si una organización privada tiene mucho poder y mucho dinero, el gobierno puede acusarla de cosas que normalmente no son ilegales para las agencias del estado.
If a private organization has a lot of power and a lot of money, the government can charge it with things that are not normally illegal for state agencies.
The thing is, I have been watching how this administration has used the Justice Department, and there is a pattern.
Institutions that investigated or criticized the people now in power become targets.
The SPLC put a lot of people who are now close to this administration on its lists.
Sí, y eso es muy importante para el futuro.
Yes, and that is very important for the future.
Otras organizaciones de derechos civiles en Estados Unidos ahora tienen miedo.
Other civil rights organizations in the United States are now afraid.
Si el gobierno puede acusar al SPLC, puede acusar a cualquier organización similar.
If the government can charge the SPLC, it can charge any similar organization.
That chilling effect is possibly the whole point.
You do not need to win the case in court.
You just need to make organizations think twice before they investigate powerful people.
The legal process itself is the punishment.
Bueno, al final, lo que me parece más importante es esto.
Well, in the end, what seems most important to me is this.
Los grupos que el SPLC infiltró, el KKK, las Naciones Arias, el Partido Nazi Americano, son grupos que atacaron y mataron a personas.
The groups that the SPLC infiltrated, the KKK, Aryan Nations, the American Nazi Party, are groups that attacked and killed people.
Esa es la razón por la que el SPLC pagó a esos informantes.
That is the reason the SPLC paid those informants.
And if this case goes forward, if organizations like the SPLC are prosecuted for infiltrating groups that committed actual violence, then who does that work?
The answer, right now, appears to be nobody.
A ver, yo no defiendo todos los métodos del SPLC.
Look, I do not defend all of the SPLC's methods.
La organización tuvo problemas reales.
The organization had real problems.
Pero la pregunta correcta es, para qué sirve acusar a esta organización ahora, en este momento político.
But the right question is, what is the purpose of charging this organization now, at this political moment.
The hunter becomes the hunted.
It is an old story.
But the last time I remember a civil rights organization in the United States facing this kind of federal pressure, it did not end well for anyone.
We will keep watching this one.
La historia de Estados Unidos con los derechos civiles es larga y muy difícil.
The history of the United States with civil rights is long and very difficult.
Este caso es otro capítulo de esa historia.
This case is another chapter of that history.
Y el resultado va a decir mucho sobre el país que quiere ser.
And the result is going to say a lot about the country it wants to be.