The Economist: rejection of Venezuela is driving the extreme right in Latin America

One night in October, Francisco Sagasti, who was Peru’s interim president for eight months until July, launched his new book in Barranco, a bohemian district of Lima. Sagasti, an academic, is a centrist who led the country through divisive elections.

The event was interrupted by protesters who surrounded the bookstore shouting “corrupt” and “assassin”The author while they beat a journalist. They belonged to ‘La Resistencia’, a group formed in 2018 under the slogan of ‘God, country and family’ to oppose communism and liberalism. They are one of the many facets of a new and more aggressive right wing in Latin America.

His breakthrough came with the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil. A former army officer disdainful of democracy and nostalgic for his country’s 1964-85 military dictatorship, Bolsonaro marked a break from previous political norms in the region. Since democratization in the 1980s, with one or two exceptions, conservative political forces were generally moderate, often influenced by the Christian Democrats.

Bolsonaro it has spawned possible imitators, of different kinds. These include Guido Manini, a retired army commander who vowed to crack down on crime and who, as outsider politician, he won 11% of the vote in Uruguay’s presidential elections in 2019.

On PeruRafael López Aliaga, a businessman who is a member of Opus Dei, a Catholic movement, won 12% in the April elections on a platform of extreme social conservatism and economic liberalism. In Argentina, Javier Milei, a libertarian economist, is on his way to winning a congressional seat in this month’s elections, competing against the main center-right coalition and the ruling Peronists.

The closest to power is José Antonio Kast, a former legislator who in his first presidential campaign in 2017 said that, if he were alive, General Pinochet, the dictator of Chile in 1973-90, I would vote for him.

For this month’s presidential elections, he has promised “restore Chile”With a strong hand against crime and violent disorder, a border ditch to stop immigrants, the withdrawal of international human rights organizations and with tax cuts to promote economic growth. It also claims to defend the European heritage and national unity of Chile against the adherence of the left to indigenous groups and multiculturalism. It seems that closet will contest a second round for the presidency against Gabriel Boric, from the extreme left.

closet It is not Bolsonaro. Rather, it represents a radical populist right, more in the mold of Alvaro Uribe, President of Colombia from 2002 to 2010. He insists that it is not “extremist“And now he does not deny that there were abuses under Pinochet’s command. Not all new right wingers pose a clear threat to democracy itself. But some do. All of them are less conciliatory than the old conservative parties. Minority groups have reason to worry.

What explains the emergence of the new right? One factor is the formation in recent years of grassroots groups with Catholic and evangelical ties that have campaigned against abortion, gay rights and feminism. Another is a popular demand for protection against crime.

As with the radical left, the radical right is profiting from public disillusionment with economic stagnation and mainstream democratic politicians, who are seen as selfish, if not corrupt. But what unites all these new right-wing forces, he says Ariel Goldstein, political scientist at the University of Buenos Aires, is “the specter of Venezuela”Which has sought to export its leftist dictatorship that spreads poverty.

In that sense, the radicalization of the right is a mirror of the same process of the left. Yes closet has a chance of winning, as it does, it is partly because BoricDemocratic as he may be, he defends a statist economic program and has communist allies.

The new right in Latin America is also part of a broader international trend. The victory of Donald Trump in the United States in 2016 paved the way for Bolsonaro. Eduardo, the son of Bolsonaro, has close ties to the nativist fringe of the Republican Party. Now Vox, a Spanish anti-immigrant party, acts as a unifying agent of the new right in Latin America.

In September he published a ‘Letter from Madrid’ denouncing communism in the “Iberosphere”And signed so far by almost 9,000 politicians or activists, among whom are Messrs. Kast, López Aliaga and Milei, in addition to Eduardo Bolsonaro. Liberal Democrats in Latin America now have to deal with not just an authoritarian left but a right that is much more intolerant than in the recent past.