Sell Your Children

The last seven years​ have brought a string of successes for the right in Latin America. In October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidency. In June the following year, Nayib Bukele came to power in El Salvador, and that November, the Bolivian right seized on an electoral crisis and ousted Evo Morales. In Peru, after the leftist Pedro Castillo narrowly won the presidency in 2021, right-wing forces in Congress paralysed his government and eighteen months later, after his failed attempt to dissolve the parliament, booted him out of office; they have maintained a lock on the country’s politics since. In Chile, the far right made a strong showing in the 2021 elections, successfully mobilised to vote down the country’s proposed new constitution in 2022 and dominated elections to the body tasked with drawing up an alternative charter in 2023. Javier Milei’s surprise win in Argentina in late 2023 confirmed and consolidated the region’s rightward drift.

This year brought another big win for the right: the implosion of the Movimiento al Socialismo in Bolivia ended almost twenty years of left-wing dominance, opening the way for the centre-right candidate Rodrigo Paz to win the presidency, while right and centre-right parties gained control of both chambers of the Legislative Assembly. In Colombia, Gustavo Petro’s left coalition is struggling, and parliamentary and presidential elections are due next year. In Chile, three of the four leading candidates for the imminent presidential contest are on the far right. Polls currently show José Antonio Kast, the far-right candidate who came close to winning four years ago, in second place behind the left coalition’s candidate, Jeannette Jara of the Chilean Communist Party; in third place is Evelyn Matthei of the Unión Demócrata Independiente, a party created in the 1980s by the Pinochet dictatorship. Kast broke with the UDI in 2016 because it was too moderate. In fourth place is Johannes Kaiser, a libertarian who broke with Kast’s new party because for him that was too moderate.

What explains this right-wing surge? To some extent it conforms to a global pattern exemplified in the US by Trump, in Asia by Modi and Duterte, and in Europe by Orbán, Le Pen, Meloni and Farage. There are parallels between these right-wing populists and Latin America’s contemporary right: they share a hostility to ‘globalism’ and to ‘gender ideology’ and the conviction that ‘cultural Marxism’ has taken hold of most of the world’s media outlets and universities. Like its peers elsewhere, Latin America’s right has also effectively exploited social media to ratchet up polarisation and outrage.

These are more than just outward similarities: they reflect real connections and alliances. The Bolsonaro clan and Milei have assiduously courted Trump; at a rally in February, before Elon Musk’s departure from DOGE, Milei appeared on stage with Musk and handed him a chainsaw as a token of budget-slashing intent. But for the Latin American right, one set of connections has been especially significant. As the Argentinian sociologist Ariel Goldstein showed in his 2022 book, La reconquista autoritaria (‘The Authoritarian Reconquest’), and continues to examine in La cuarta ola (‘The Fourth Wave’), the most crucial intermediary is the Spanish far right, whose media infrastructure and public platforms have allowed Latin American rightists to forge connections with one another as well as with their European peers.

Attachment to Spain’s imperial past is nothing new on the right in Latin America. Since independence, its elites have cast wistful glances across the Atlantic, pining for the colonial system that guaranteed their privileges and defending hispanidad as a cultural bulwark against the barbarism of the non-European masses. The new right in the former metropole – in particular the Vox party, founded in 2013 – openly celebrates Spain’s imperial history. Vox has also played an important role in building global far-right networks through the Foro Madrid, an international gathering similar to the US Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC itself has held meetings in Brazil (2019-25), Mexico (2022) and Argentina (2024). Following its foundation in Spain in 2020, the Foro Madrid has held exuberant follow-ups in Bogotá, Lima, Buenos Aires and Asunción.

Goldstein shows that Vox-facilitated connections with Eastern European figures such as Orbán and Kaczyński have given new energy to the rather tired anti-communism of the Latin American right, infusing it with a post-Cold War triumphalism. Vox has joined Venezuelan right-wingers in adopting the term ‘narco-communism’, which combines old-fashioned Red-baiting with allegations of criminality. Vox deputies to the European Parliament have talked up the threat from left-of-centre ‘narco-communist’ governments in Latin America in an attempt to bend EU foreign policy further to the right.

The prominence of these Spanish connections is one feature that distinguishes the Latin American right. (Imagine if, say, Nigel Farage were the link man for the right across the former British Empire.) In Contra la amenaza fantasma (‘Against the Imaginary Threat’), the Peruvian political commentator Farid Kahhat points to another difference: hostility to migrants is a less central feature of Latin America’s contemporary right than it is elsewhere. Politicians such as Milei and Kast have voiced xenophobic sentiments, and migrants – from Venezuela, Central America and Ecuador, as well as further afield – certainly experience discrimination and state repression. But they have not become such prominent targets of right-wing discourse as in Europe or the US. And while Bolsonaro’s supporters claimed the Brazilian flag and national football team kit as their symbols, for the most part nationalism doesn’t have the same blood-and-soil valence in Latin America as in Europe, nor does it have the same aggressive colonialist swagger.

The resurgence of Latin America’s right is all the more remarkable when you consider what came before it. Between 1998 and 2014, left-wing candidates won a total of 32 elections in 13 different countries, from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. By the end of 2011, at the height of the Pink Tide, some three-fifths of the region’s population lived in countries ruled by elected left-wing governments. Nowhere else in the world experienced anything like this. For Kahhat, this alone means that the Latin American right is ‘not simply the regional expression of a global phenomenon’. Its recent rise is first and foremost a drive to reverse the consequences of the left’s long electoral dominance.

But this still leaves us with questions. Why are new far-right groups leading the rollback of the Pink Tide, rather than traditional right-wing parties? The Pink Tide began to ebb after 2014, with the end of the sustained boom in commodity prices. At first, a familiar type of conservative benefited from the left’s dwindling popularity: the billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera won the Chilean presidency in 2010 and again in 2018; in Argentina, Mauricio Macri of the centre-right Propuesta Republicana party came to power in 2015; in Peru in 2016, the former IMF and World Bank economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski edged out Keiko Fujimori, a right-wing populist. In Brazil, Rousseff was impeached and replaced by her vice president, Michel Temer, of the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, a big-tent centre-right party that was founded in the 1960s as the official opposition under the country’s military dictatorship.

But since 2018, the far right has gained the momentum. When Bolsonaro won the presidency that year, his Partido Social Liberal went from having a single seat in Congress to being the second largest party with 52. Alongside electoral successes such as those of Bolsonaro, Bukele and Milei, the right has adopted a range of strategies, from outright coups as in Bolivia to co-ordinated institutional blockages as in Peru. For Kahhat, the timing and intensity of the surge can in large part be explained by a general mood of anti-incumbency in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Latin America experienced some of the highest mortality rates worldwide (Peru’s figure of 660 deaths per 100,000 was nearly twice as high as the UK’s). This was a damaging demonstration of state incapacity, and it makes sense that there would be a political backlash, especially given the economic slump that followed. But even if the pandemic were to account for the intensification of Latin America’s rightward shift, it doesn’t explain why it began in 2018, two years before Covid.

Another way​ of framing the question is to ask how new the Latin American far right actually is, and where it stands in relation to other forms of conservatism in the region. Does it represent a novel and distinctive political project, or are we looking at the old conservatism in new clothes? The simple and unsatisfying answer is: both. There are some obvious and startling innovations, from Milei’s anarcho-libertarianism to Bukele’s blend of mass incarceration and social media trolling (you could call it the ‘influence and punish’ model). But the right’s revival has also involved the return of some all too familiar motifs, whether it be Bolsonaro’s celebration of the brutal repression of the left by Brazil’s military dictatorship or the overt anti-Indigenous racism of Jeanine Añez’s regime in Bolivia.

In order to understand the way these aspects of right-wing thought and practice interrelate one must look beyond the rise and fall of particular parties. As the Argentinian historian Ernesto Bohoslavsky argues in Historia mínima de las derechas latinoamericanas (‘Concise History of the Latin American Rights’), political parties have only ever been one of many forms the right has taken – and not always the most important. Bohoslavsky initially defines the Latin American right as ‘the specifically political organisations that actively defend unequal forms of distributing goods, opportunities and recognition between social classes, but also between men and women and between generations’. Yet for most of the book he takes a different tack: rather than viewing the right as an organised political tendency embodying a given set of ideas, he sees it as the expression of elite interests. Depending on the context, elites can use different forms of power to maintain or restore those inequalities, from military force to economic coercion, and from ideological persuasion to political authority. Political parties are the most obvious manifestation, but the right can also draw on other ‘sources of social power’ – the concept derives from the historical sociology of Michael Mann – when needed.

This explains the plural noun in Bohoslavsky’s title: he sees the Latin American right as a heterogeneous tradition, taking up different strategies and ideas over time. In the political realm, electoralism has alternated with dictatorships; in economics, the right has at various times adopted laissez-faire liberalism, state-led developmentalism, corporatism and neoliberalism; in culture, the centrality of nationalism and religion has fluctuated, though staunch anti-communism has been a constant theme.

Bohoslavsky begins his story at the end of the 19th century. Most histories of the right begin with the French Revolution, the event that gave us the terminology of right and left in the first place, and which is generally taken to have inaugurated the battle between conservatism and liberalism. But for Bohoslavsky, the liberal-conservative rifts that opened up in Latin America after independence didn’t challenge entrenched power so much as pit rival factions of the elites against one another. This is perhaps an oversimplification: a substantial body of scholarship has shown that liberalism attracted considerable popular support. But liberalism’s right-wing proponents in Latin America have always harboured a deep suspicion of the masses, and have historically been much more committed to liberalism’s economic tenets than to any democratising impulses.

The right-wing liberalism that was prevalent across much of the region by the end of the 19th century sought to boost exports and draw in foreign investors while preserving the existing oligarchic regime. With the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, however, came new challenges that both Latin America’s liberals and conservatives fought to contain. Bohoslavsky sees the 1920s as a period of political experimentation, in which the right expanded its repertoire beyond the traditional forms of oligarchic dominance. This included the use of guardias blancas, paramilitary forces, to suppress peasant discontent in the countryside. The 1920s also saw the promotion of the ‘Red Scare’, well in advance of actual communist parties being formed. (Bohoslavsky cites the example of a 1922 strike in Ecuador that was blamed on communist agitators and bloodily suppressed; the Ecuadorean Socialist Party didn’t exist until 1926.)

The ruling class found itself increasingly confronting the question of how to channel or contain mass politics. In the 1930s, amid the turmoil of the Great Depression, the solution most commonly arrived at was authoritarianism: between 1930 and 1937, there were coups or military-led uprisings in Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Peru (twice), Chile, Uruguay, Cuba and Bolivia. This was a time of strongman regimes in much of the region, from Juan Vicente Gómez’s long rule over Venezuela (1908-35) to Jorge Ubico’s iron grip on Guatemala (1931-44) or the start of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua. It was also the era of fascism in Europe, and Latin America saw similar stirrings on the far right, from Chile’s Movimiento Nacional Socialista to Mexico’s Camisas doradas (‘goldshirts’). Yet these were generally small and marginal players. Brazil was the only country where a sizeable fascist movement took root: the Ação Integralista Brasileira (Brazilian Integralist Action), which by the late 1930s had around 400,000 members. There was no fascist remaking of the old order as in Germany, Italy or Spain. The traditional pillars of elite rule, especially the army, proved firm enough.

A brief democratic opening after the Second World War saw communist parties win 10 per cent of the vote in Brazil and Chile, leading to gag laws and bans as Latin American leaders adopted Washington’s Cold War agenda. But Bohoslavsky argues that the ‘anti-totalitarian’ discourse of the Cold War also had a different effect: from the 1940s to the early 1960s, Latin American conservatives in principle accepted democratic rule and agreed to work within a constitutional framework. This is one of the periods when right-wing political parties grew in influence, their effectiveness as a mechanism for maintaining power more widely appreciated. The right adapted to the times in other ways, joining a broad consensus behind the need for state-led economic development. Governments of the centre right oversaw import-substitution industrialisation policies and launched agrarian reform programmes, if timidly. According to Bohoslavsky, at this point the far right was still a relatively minor presence. But – a significant change – the traditional right became increasingly able to call on external allies, especially the United States, as the ultimate guarantor of their power.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 again raised the spectre of popular mobilisation. With the developmentalist model slowing down in many places, the willingness of Latin American elites to tolerate democratic rule began to fade even as pressures from the left began to multiply. The 1964 military coup in Brazil was the first of a new wave of dictatorships that continued across the region into the 1980s, from Pinochet in Chile to the succession of juntas in Argentina. These regimes were not only more brutal than their predecessors; they were also much more institutionalised. By this stage, Latin American militaries were largely equipped and trained by the US and adhered to the US national security doctrine in regarding any internal challenge as externally orchestrated ‘subversion’. Right-wing paramilitary groups emerged in many places in the 1960s and 1970s as an adjunct to official anti-communism, giving regimes new tools for exercising violence beyond the armed forces.

The break with democratic rule opened space for far-right ideas to gain ground, not just the hysterical anti-communism of the Argentinian generals but also the authoritarian neoliberalism of the ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile. The final dismantling of state-led developmentalism in Latin America took some time, but the process began under authoritarian rule. It’s important to note that, with some honourable exceptions, the traditional right-wing parties often supported these regimes, undermining any hard-and-fast distinction between moderate and extreme right. In the grim light of the 1970s, the difference between the two seems to be less a matter of principle than a division of labour.

The complaisant attitude of so many conservatives towards Latin America’s dictatorships told against them when these regimes finally fell in the 1980s. By this point, the generals had proved economically incompetent as well as brutal, and their ‘anti-subversive’ fervour had outlived its usefulness. But as Bohoslavsky puts it, the carefully managed democratisation of the 1980s and 1990s was not a defeat for the armed forces but a strategic retreat, and in many cases political parties formed during the dictatorships remained significant electoral players: the UDI in Chile, Brazil’s Partido Democrático Social, the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista in El Salvador. With unions and the organised left deeply damaged by years of repression, the discrediting of much of the political right did not lead to great advances for the progressive cause. The end of dictatorships in Latin America coincided instead with the ascendancy of neoliberalism and, in a bitter historical irony, it was in many cases the centre left that took up the right’s economic agenda, implementing free-market reforms that included some of the most rapid and extensive privatisations in the world.

The dominance of neoliberalism in the 1990s created the conditions for the Latin American right to accept the democratic rules of the game once more. As Bohoslavsky puts it, ‘they were dealing with neoliberalised democracies’ – that is, ‘regimes in which political negotiations … and struggles held no risks for the elites’. Yet the socioeconomic impacts of free-market reforms – rising inequality and unemployment, cuts to welfare, dwindling provision of social services – generated opposition. In 1989, mass protests took place in Venezuela against IMF-dictated economic measures; in 1994, the Zapatistas launched their rebellion in Mexico on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force; four years later, Chávez’s victory in Venezuela marked the start of a fifteen-year turn to the left in Latin America.

Opposition to neoliberalism was a unifying theme across the Pink Tide, and the basis of its electoral successes. Against the Washington Consensus, a term introduced by the economist John Williamson to describe the standard package of neoliberal reforms, stood the Buenos Aires Consensus, a manifesto signed in 2003 by the heads of Brazil and Argentina, Lula (Luiz Inácio da Silva) and Néstor Kirchner. Yet while Pink Tide governments mounted a powerful ideological challenge to neoliberalism, they were much less successful in charting an economic course out of it; and though they significantly reduced income inequality, they weren’t able to implement structural changes that would fundamentally shift economic power away from the elites. From behind its fortified redoubts, the right prepared to launch its counter-offensive.

Most accounts of the right’s recent rise rely on a distinction between a ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ right and a ‘traditional’ right, with the latter working through institutional democratic structures and the former either sceptical of them or rejecting democracy entirely. But Bohoslavsky’s longer history shows that the distinction is not so easy to maintain. Although the political and institutional means used by different sections of the right have varied over time, as have the tone and content of right-wing discourse, the overriding purpose – the defence of elite interests – has remained consistent. Yet the challenges posed to those interests have changed over the decades, and in the light of Bohoslavsky’s account, it’s there that we should look for explanations of the recent step change from right to far right.

While the economic challenge posed by the Pink Tide was significant, for Bohoslavsky it was the political challenge that predominantly shaped the right’s response. In the 2000s, governments across the region disputed the key neoliberal premise that markets should determine the allocation of goods. But they also either introduced or planned progressive legislation on abortion, same-sex marriage, education and Indigenous rights. In some cases – Argentina, Brazil, Chile – left-wing governments engaged in ‘memory politics’, launching truth commissions and inquiries into the crimes of the military dictatorships. Against all this, the contemporary right seeks not only to restore the supremacy of the market, but to reinforce patriarchal norms and ‘traditional’ gender roles, and to defend the ‘anti-subversive’ record of the dictatorships, calling for what they term a ‘complete memory’. Bohoslavsky sums up their agenda as ‘order in the market, in the streets and in the home’.

This aggressive response promises a more rapid and thorough reversal of the Pink Tide than the region’s more traditional conservative parties have offered, and largely accounts for the generous backing many of the new far-right parties have received. It also helps to explain the question of timing: after the traditional right failed to defeat the Pink Tide, many of its adherents began to contemplate more drastic solutions. This includes key figures in the traditional conservative establishment: it was Macri, who had failed to kill off Peronism in Argentina during his presidency from 2015-19, who brokered the right-wing alliance that carried Milei to victory in 2023.

The Pink Tide governments used the state as their tool to reverse the inequalities generated by neoliberalism. Under the rubric of austerity, the right has sought to render that tool unusable by curtailing the state’s redistributive capacities – first by cutting budgets and then, in Milei’s case, by eliminating large swathes of the state apparatus. This animus against the state is reflected in the increasing weight of libertarianism within the right’s ideological mix. Previously a marginal trend in Latin America, it has acquired vocal advocates in Milei and among online influencers such as Agustín Laje in Argentina and Johannes Kaiser in Chile, and has attracted significant funding from billionaires including Eduardo Eurnekian, one of Milei’s main backers.

Libertarian think tanks have also played an important role, especially those allied with the Atlas Network, created by Antony Fisher, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Out of the five hundred affiliated organisations the Atlas Network claims to have around the world, 120 are in Latin America. (For comparison, South Asia and East Asia have only 21 each.) In her 2021 book Menos Marx, Mais Mises (‘Less Marx, More Mises’), the Brazilian academic Camila Rocha explored the role of these think tanks in her country, describing the resulting confluence of Austrian School economics and other strands of right-wing thought as ‘conservative ultra-liberalism’. The label captures Milei’s hybrid agenda too: hard libertarianism combined with praise for the military dictatorship, deregulation of markets alongside challenges to women’s reproductive rights. How stable this ideological mix will be remains to be seen; Kahhat quotes an interview from 2022 in which Milei dodges the question of whether he agrees with Murray Rothbard’s suggestion in For a New Liberty (1973) that people should be allowed to sell their own children – perhaps taking the idea of ‘family values’ a little too literally. For now, the obvious contradictions between the right’s different components have been smoothed away by the common project of reversing the Pink Tide. And as Rocha and others such as Quinn Slobodian have pointed out, Austrian School economics did have a strong moral component, often seeing the kinds of collectivity dear to conservative thought – the family, the nation, the ethnos – as crucial to the smooth functioning of the market.

Moral concerns are not new for the Latin American right, of course. Its vehement opposition to what it calls ‘gender ideology’ is of a piece with the longstanding conservative defence of the nuclear family, and much of its anti-communism was and is a reaction to the left’s secularism. But what seems different now is that its moral agenda has been permeated by market imperatives. As Bohoslavsky makes clear, earlier versions of the right had a strong anti-materialist tendency, emphasising spiritual over earthly matters. He cites the Argentinian reactionary Miguel Cané, who in 1877 was already lamenting his compatriots’ decline into the grubby world of commerce: ‘Our fathers were soldiers, poets and artists. We are shopkeepers, hawkers and speculators.’ The current crop of rightists would be unlikely to complain about being put in the latter company (though Milei’s promotion and then withdrawal of support for a cryptocurrency called $LIBRA did cause the first major scandal of his presidency).

It’s​ striking how thoroughly Latin America’s contemporary right has absorbed neoliberalism. Earlier cohorts entertained a range of economic philosophies, depending on what best served their interests at the time. The question today is how to make their other concerns compatible with the supremacy of the market. As Bohoslavsky puts it, ‘this extreme right does not want to replace the neoliberal order, to overwhelm democratic institutions or to offer an alternative future like classical fascism, but rather to become a more efficient and authoritarian guarantor of … a moral, social and economic order that is supposedly under threat.’

The perceived threats to this order range from real political opponents and social trends to inflated or imagined menaces, as the title of Kahhat’s book indicates. At its foundation in 2020, the Foro Madrid identified itself as the right-wing counterweight to two international organisations of the left, the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group. Both of these have had symbolic significance as spaces where Pink Tide leaders gather, but they have played a negligible role in establishing a shared policy agenda – let alone serving as the venue for plotting a communist takeover of the Americas, as the right apparently believes. Perhaps these diplomatic talking shops were the best they could do by way of sinister antagonists, in the absence of an actual international communist movement. If anything, the Foro Madrid’s image of these organisations is more accurate as a self-portrait in reverse: a well-funded, internationally co-ordinated effort to devise an ultra-conservative agenda for the whole region that would reimpose ‘order’ in the name of ‘freedom’.

Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of Latin America’s contemporary right is its confident embrace of electoral politics. As Bohoslavsky’s account makes clear, the right’s recurring dilemma throughout the 20th century was how to secure majority consent for a system of government that would continue to benefit a small minority. The answer it most frequently arrived at was not to ask: after all, why bother to hold elections, let alone construct a durable political hegemony, when you can just bring in the army? Today’s right has – for now – mostly opted to contest the Pink Tide’s successes in the political arena, though it is clearly willing to resort to other methods when it loses, as shown by the failed insurrection of January 2023 by Bolsonaro’s supporters. (Milei even contested the results of the primary election he won in August 2023, which suggests that the desire to impugn the democratic process runs deep.) Amid the broad discrediting of existing parties, the right has found paths to electoral victory with ‘outsider’ candidates, and with new formations: Milei’s La Libertad Avanza or Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas. In each case, the victors appealed to voters far beyond the right’s traditional social base.

This in turn may only be one symptom of deeper social transformations that have taken place in Latin America, wrought by neoliberalism and only partially delayed or diverted by the Pink Tide. Increasingly precarious employment, a long onslaught against organised labour, the slow degradation of welfare systems, rapid but largely informal urbanisation, spiralling inequality – all this has disaggregated many of the collectivities through which people formerly made sense of their lives, producing a fragmented electorate that has proved fertile terrain for the right. For much of its history the Latin American left has placed its hopes in ‘the people’, yet Bohoslavsky wonders if the long reign of neoliberalism has done away with that term as a coherent political signifier. He also raises a more sombre possibility: that the socioeconomic changes of recent decades have enabled the right to shape its own version of ‘the people’, providing a willing foundation for the kinds of authoritarianism that used to be imposed by force. On that logic, figures such as Bolsonaro, Bukele and Milei are both revivals of the region’s right-wing traditions and bleak portents of what is to come.