What’s New and What’s Old with Latin America's Right Wing?

 

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research launches its dossier no. 47, analysing the right-wing developments in Latin America, identifying how they operate and with what discourses, what social base they mobilise, and their continuities of and ruptures with the history of the right wing in the continent.

The pandemic that emerged in 2020 showed the profound decay of the capitalist West and the major crisis of its model of civilisation. This provided a wealth of possibilities for the initiatives of the extreme right, which assumed the role of condemning ‘the system’, voicing the need to break with inertia, and expressing the tedium and weariness caused by capitalist realism that does not offer alternatives. Latin America was not spared from this wave of new right-wing formations. From the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil – the most important country in the region in economic and geopolitical terms – to the emergence of Nayib Bukele as president in El Salvador, different figures of the non-traditional right have gained political weight, visibility, and mass influence. In New Clothes, Old Threads, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research presents an analysis of these right-wing movements in Latin America. This is comprised of both an old right and a new right: its new clothes are woven with the same old threads of racism, classism, homophobia, misogyny, authoritarianism, militarism, and repression of the past. To a large extent, the relationship between technological developments in Silicon Valley and the emergent right wing is well known. Sectors aligned with neo-reactionary positions have reinforced the anti-statist and anti-globalist notions that fuel the new right-wing movements in the Global North. They have done this based on the latest developments in online platforms, social media, and cryptocurrencies. Is the ‘Silicon Valley ideology’ setting the pace for the demands and proposals of the ruling classes in the countries south of the Río Bravo? What link does this new emerging right have with local ruling classes?

Read Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s new dossier: New Clothes, Old Threads: The Dangerous Right-Wing Offensive in Latin America

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. We seek to bridge gaps in our knowledge about the political economy as well as social hierarchy that will facilitate the work of our political movements and engage in the ‘battle of ideas’ to fight against bourgeois ideology, which has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media. Dossiers by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research are produced in  Social media is bold. Social media is young. Social media raises questions.  Social media is not satisfied with an answer. Social media looks at the big picture.  Social media is interested in every detail. social media is curious.  Social media is free. Social media is irreplaceable. But never irrelevant. Social media is you. (With input from news agency language)  If you like this story, share it with a friend!   We are a non-profit organization. Help us financially to keep our journalism free from government and corporate pressure