Reactionary Americas: The global laboratory of the right

Nayib Bukele has turned El Salvador into a global showcase for public security, albeit at the cost of, at the very least, undermining the country’s institutions and leveraging his undeniable popularity in a bid to entrench himself in power, which he first won in 2019. Argentina’s Javier Milei has been wielding an imaginary chainsaw from the Casa Rosada, which he has occupied for nearly three years. By then, U.S. President Donald Trump was already preparing his return to the White House, promising the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. Meanwhile, in Chile, José Antonio Kast was continuing to gain ground while trying to tone down his nostalgia for the Pinochet era.

Since August 7, Colombia has been governed by Abelardo de la Espriella, the former lawyer of drug traffickers, who has turned provocation, rejection of progressivism and the promise of unapologetic strong-arm tactics into a political platform that has carried him to power.

Viewed separately, none of these scenes explains the Americas. Viewed together, they begin to sketch out a map.

For a long time, especially during the first quarter-century of this century, that map was read as a pendulum. The region would swing to the left and then back to the right. At times, it would return to the center. It was a convenient explanation, perhaps even a comforting one for defeated political forces, in a continent accustomed to unstable governments, short economic cycles and electorates eager to punish those in power.

But perhaps the pendulum is no longer enough to describe what is happening. The color of governments is no longer the only thing that is changing.

Alberto Vergara, a Peruvian academic, has proposed speaking instead of a reactionary Americas. The term, he argues, avoids the endless debate over whether each new candidate should be described as conservative, radical, populist, ultra-right or far right. It also helps clarify the nature of the phenomenon: these are not merely political forces seeking more conservative reforms or a smaller state, but a reaction against the civil, political and social openings that accompanied democratic transitions and expanded over recent decades.

The Latin American right of the 1990s promised to leave the past behind. It spoke of privatization, fiscal discipline, trade liberalization and modernization. Governments were dominated by economists trained at U.S. universities, who extolled the virtues of the market and offered countries struggling with inflation and state failure a fast track to the future. For that generation of conservatives, history was a burden. Populism had to be overcome and politics reduced to the rational administration of the economy.

The new right in the Americas, like its counterparts elsewhere in the world, is looking in a different direction. It has not necessarily abandoned economic liberalism; Milei remains a case in point, but it no longer sees the market alone as sufficient to build a political identity.

A recent academic paper by Vergara and historian Camila Perochena illustrated this shift through a telling example. In downtown Lima, Francisco Pizarro made his return in 2025. The conquistador’s equestrian statue had been removed from the vicinity of the Plaza Mayor square in 2003. At the time, the city’s mayor argued that public space should incorporate symbols capable of representing a more diverse society.

Two decades later, another mayor from the same political tradition, Rafael López Aliaga, ordered the statue’s return to the historic center. He did so alongside Madrid premier Isabel Díaz Ayuso and descendants of Pizarro, in a ceremony conceived not as the discreet restoration of a monument but as a battle over the meaning of history itself. The horse was the same. The right was not.

For Vergara and Perochena, what distinguishes the new right from its predecessors is precisely that it has brought history back to the center of politics. It is, after all, a cultural battle, much like the one championed by Trump’s MAGA movement from the heart of the empire.

The return of Pizarro is more than a Peruvian anecdote. In Argentina, Milei’s government restored the name Día de la Raza (Columbus Day), which was previously called Day of Respect of Cultural Diversity, and portrayed Columbus’s arrival as the beginning of civilization. Jair Bolsonaro openly defended Brazil’s military dictatorship and turned its relics, uniforms and ceremonies into instruments of political identity. José Antonio Kast has been forced to tone down his relationship with Pinochetism, but he nonetheless emerges from that tradition. In Peru, Alberto Fujimori’s legacy is being rehabilitated, while a Catholic and Hispanic tradition is being championed against what the right labels cultural Marxism.

Each movement adapts to its own national history a repertoire that the international right has displayed across the world, particularly in Europe. Yet behind those differences lies a common impulse: to revisit who fully belongs to the political community and which groups, in this view, have acquired too much influence, too much visibility or too many rights.

The word nostalgia, however, can be misleading. Reactionary Americas is not advancing simply because it has found an appealing interpretation of the past. Its rise has been enabled by the fractures of the present.

The region is grappling with a host of frustrations: inequality, insecurity, corruption, violence, deficient public services and a deep distrust of institutions. And this is happening largely after progressive movements and the left occupied positions of power to an unprecedented degree across the continent, to the point where the six largest economies in Latin America, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Peru, were at one stage all governed simultaneously by progressive leaders, something that had never happened before. Now, popular discontent is coming back to haunt those same political forces.

As Manuel Canelas, the Bolivian political scientist and former minister in Evo Morales’s last government, puts it: “The left struggles to accept that there is a right-wing people. Amid the waves that come and go, perhaps we should pay attention to what settles beneath them. The dream that it was all just a bad dream no longer works.”

Pablo Stefanoni, the journalist and historian who wrote the influential ¿La rebeldía se volvió de derechas? (Did Rebellion Turn Right-Wing?), also warns against seeing this as a monolithic bloc: “The extreme right is a kind of emotional community. Bukele says the public sector should be better than the private sector; Milei says the state is a pedophile in a kindergarten; Kast is a post-Pinochet national conservative. The glue is anti-progressivism, or anti-wokeness. And now the United States has joined these right-wing movements as well. On top of that, they are all aligned with Israel.”

At the same time, he notes that Mexico and Brazil, the region’s two giants, remain under progressive governments.

Within that emotional universe, contradictions in policy platforms and campaign promises matter less than sharing a common adversary. What matters is being applauded by the same audience, one eager for hostility toward progressivism.

Reactionary Americas does not yet have a consensus comparable to the one that revolved around market economics in the 1990s. In each country, it responds to different concerns. Public insecurity and tough-on-crime policies were crucial in Ecuador and Colombia; the economy has been central in Argentina and Bolivia; and migration has played that role in Chile.

What political consultant Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí, one of the region’s leading strategists, identifies as the common thread is a promise that cuts across all these cases: “To regain lost control, whether over borders, the streets or the economy. Or, put another way, to restore predictability to people’s lives, so that your life is not at risk at any given moment. So that tomorrow feels sufficiently secure and guaranteed.”

Security occupies a central place in the political struggle unfolding across the Americas. The expansion of organized crime and governments’ inability to contain it have turned fear into a daily reality for millions of Latin Americans. The radical right did not invent this problem, but it has offered a highly visible response: mega-prisons, soldiers on the streets, large-scale security operations and states of emergency. Security policies that produce gradual improvements without public displays of punishment can go unnoticed. Hard-line approaches, by contrast, provide immediate symbolic gratification.

Stefanoni calls it the “marketing of cruelty.” Bukele’s mega-prison is not merely a correctional facility; it is a political image whose influence extends far beyond El Salvador.

The left is by no means blameless for the rise of this reactionary Americas. After monopolizing the language of change for decades, parts of the progressive movement began recycling exhausted formulas and came to be perceived as a new elite. The old left-wing populisms lost their ability to inspire. The redistributive policies associated with the commodities boom improved the lives of millions, but were not enough to transform weak states, informal economies and fragile public services. More than that, the decline of some of their leaders has been striking: Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro is in prison in New York; Argentina’s Cristina Fernández is under house arrest; Ecuador’s Rafael Correa is living in exile in Belgium; and Evo Morales is self-exiled in Bolivia’s Chapare region, rallying supporters against the current government.

Moreover, the reaction now sweeping the continent did not emerge outside the system it opposes; in part, it was incubated by it. Progressive governments that embraced strongman politics, polarization and contempt for pluralism, drifting from agents of change into authoritarianism, helped legitimize those same tactics for their opponents. The notion of refounding the nation, portraying political rivals as traitors, and treating electoral victory as a blank cheque laid the groundwork for a right-wing movement willing to play a more aggressive game. Abelardo de la Espriella, as the nemesis of Gustavo Petro’s government, may be the clearest example. During his presidency, Petro himself frequently used social media to attack opponents in strikingly similar terms.

There is another factor that is not unique to the Americas, although it has intensified in recent years. Reactionary ideas now spread at remarkable speed. Forums, foundations, advisers, influencers, video channels and digital platforms turn local issues into chapters in a global culture war.

As Pablo Stefanoni explains, we are witnessing a kind of “great global supermarket of reactionary arguments, which is why Argentine libertarians, where there is no Islamism, talk about the Islamization of the West and try to build an absurd moral panic.”

Each leader picks from the shelves of that supermarket the fears that best resonate with their audience: communism, immigration, gender ideology, electoral fraud, globalist elites. Some products sell everywhere; others are adapted or quietly left aside. Milei tones down at home some of the positions he proudly displays on international stages. Kast prioritizes security and the economy whenever cultural-war issues threaten to narrow his support base. The reactionary right has its convictions, but polls still matter.

For much of the 20th century, the archetypal Latin American strongman needed a party, an army, trade unions or some other form of patronage network. Today’s strongman is instead a celebrity with a direct connection to millions of followers. Milei, Bukele and De la Espriella are leaders who narrate their own epic story, identify their enemies and turn every criticism into proof that the system is conspiring against them. In Gutiérrez-Rubí’s view, the infrastructure of strongman politics has changed, but not its plebiscitary and emotional logic: “Before there was a direct relationship; today it is through platforms and digital communities.”

Donald Trump occupies a central place in that transformation, not because Latin America’s leaders are simply imitating him, but because the MAGA movement provides a common reference point for an otherwise disparate ideological family. For decades, strongman politics was viewed from Washington as a distinctly Latin American pathology. It is not that the United States has become “Latin Americanized”; rather, reactionary Americas suggests that the strongman was never a peculiarity of the South, but a general temptation within democracy itself.

Stefanoni introduces another important nuance. The new leaders, some of whom are considered outsiders, have not necessarily become classic caudillos. They may be more celebrities than strongmen, more adept at dismantling old consensuses than at building a new order. Many lack solid party structures and, so far, have left office when they lose elections, although Trump and Bolsonaro both encouraged attacks on democratic institutions after their electoral defeats.

Reactionary Americas is not yet a regional regime or an inevitable destination. Progressive movements retain significant social bases, as demonstrated by Iván Cepeda’s strong showing in Colombia’s most recent election and by Rodrigo Sánchez in Peru. In many countries, institutions continue to limit the ambitions of political leaders, while feminist and human-rights movements still have the capacity for resistance. The right has shown remarkable skill in winning elections and mobilizing public sentiment, but not necessarily in solving the problems that brought it to power.

Latin America has spent much of its history searching for the future. The right of the 1990s promised to find it in the market. The left of the early 21st century sought it through equality and the inclusion of the excluded. Today’s reactionary movements propose a different journey: a return to a supposedly orderly, hierarchical and probably imagined past, one that predates uncertainty, diversity and the expansion of rights. They have found a language with which to conjure disorder. They have yet to prove they can govern it.

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