The Poverty of the Latin American Right
The American Conservative · R · trust 44/100
Toadying to Washington is not a durable platform for the region.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... On June 21, Colombians narrowly elected the right-wing lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella to the presidency over the leftist candidate Iván Cepeda. Since 2023, right-wingers have won 11 of the past 13 elections in Latin America. De la Espriella’s victory comes as a jewel in the crown for the Trump administration and its so-called “Donroe Doctrine.” Sadly, the track record of recent conservative governments in the Americas—with the exception of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele—has been disappointing at best and catastrophic at worst.
In its current form, the Latin American right seems determined to act as little more than a foil for the region’s leftists. Time and again, Latin American conservatives have elevated market fundamentalism and the interests of Washington above those of their own nations and their workers. De la Espriella’s election is the culmination of this condition. The new president is the first in Colombian history to have won election after having campaigned as a toady to the Yankees.
De la Espriella fits the right-wing, Latin American archetype of the outsider businessman, having made millions representing clients of ill repute, including the former President Álvaro Uribe and the Maduro loyalist Alex Saab. In his own words, the new president’s international role models are the United States’ President Donald Trump, Argentina’s President Javier Milei and the Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele—Milei being de la Espriella’s greatest influence by far.
Like Milei, the new president was a natural adherent of elite libertarianism prior to his presidential campaign. Up until recently, he vocally supported euthanasia and unrestricted abortion, and even gave an impassioned speech in favor of adoption by same-sex couples. The issue, of course, is that this combination of progressive social and free-market views is repellent to working-class conservatives. De la Espriella now claims that he opposes abortion, championing family values. Of course, his platform calls for copying Milei’s “chainsaw” fiscal austerity.
Most dubious, however, is the millionaire lawyer’s conversion from godless globalist to Catholic, Colombian patriot. In 2017, de la Espriella gave an interview explaining his atheism, stating that he denied the existence of anything that reason could not explain. When asked why he married his wife through the Catholic Church, he replied , “We all commit foolishness and stupidities for love.” In the same vein, the new president is a tri-citizen of Colombia, Italy, and the United States, having spent much of his time living abroad since 2016 .
The right-wing paragon now claims that he found God in 2020 following his aunt’s death during the Covid-19 pandemic. The new president has emulated the Christian-nationalist strains of MAGA and Bolsonarismo in Brazil while adopting the slogan Firme por la patria —firm for the homeland. He likewise embraced the Colombian national team’s soccer jersey as a quasi-uniform, despite having previously stated that he “detested” the sport. Accordingly, the sincerity of the former atheist’s conversion to Catholicism has been rightly questioned, as has his perceived dual loyalty to the United States.
In June, de la Espriella stated that he voted for Trump and is a registered Republican in the United States; his wife likewise made a gaffe during the campaign by saying that, if they lost the election, they simply could return to their luxury abodes in Florence and Miami. More troublingly, Abelardo the Miami Neocon has celebrated the White House’s extrajudicial killings of alleged “narcoterrorists” in Colombian waters, few of which have come with concrete proof of drug trafficking. The right-wing lawyer has even gone as far as to propose cooperating with the U.S. on strikes inside of Colombia.
De la Espriella is ultimately a caricature of a self-hating, cosmopolitan elite; he even went so far as to denigrate a traditional Colombian dish prior to his presidential campaign. Ironically, this disposition resembles the self-hatred of Western progressives, who skew overwhelmingly toward the credentialed classes. American progressives like Hasan Piker typically regard shows of patriotism as problematic and paradoxically extol foreign nationalist movements like Mexico’s Morena and the CCP. In the same way, leaders like de la Espriella and Milei worship Washington and its allies while regarding their own countries as backward; unsurprisingly, college-educated voters disproportionately favor right-wing candidates in the region.
When asked about the national disgrace of Argentina’s 1982 defeat to the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands, Milei told the BBC, “There was a war and we lost. The British did a good job. Margaret Thatcher was brilliant.” Putting aside the merits of Argentina’s longstanding claim to the Falklands, it’s stunning to see such deference towards the UK from the country’s head of state. Following Argentina’s victory over England in the World Cup semifinal, players from the Argentine squad raised a banner stating that the Falklands rightfully belonged to the country. In response, Milei warned his supporters not to fall for “cheap populist and nationalist slogans”.
More consequential was the Trump administration’s March gathering of virtually all of the hemisphere’s right-of-center leaders for the so-called Shield of the Americas Summit in Miami. The event was striking for its participants’ unwillingness to criticize the White House’s more than 200 maritime killings of their countrymen. Last month, de la Espriella announced that Colombia would open a Shield of the Americas office in Medellín.
Since the 1990s, and in some cases earlier, neoliberal centrist and right-wing governments in Latin America have adhered dogmatically to market fundamentalist policies, including the dismantling of labor rights, mass…
Read the original at The American Conservative →
Open in TruthVane →