Reactionary Americas: How the Right Rewrote the Region's Political Map

Abelardo de la Espriella took office as Colombia's president on August 7th, and with him came something that has been quietly reshaping the political landscape across Latin America: a new kind of right-wing movement that looks nothing like the one that dominated the 1990s. From El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, who has built a global reputation on security crackdowns at the cost of institutional decay, to Argentina's Javier Milei, wielding his chainsaw metaphors from the Casa Rosada for nearly three years, to Chile's José Antonio Kast, still carrying the weight of Pinochet nostalgia, the region's political map is being redrawn. Even the United States has joined the chorus, with Donald Trump preparing his return to the White House and promising the largest deportation operation in American history. Mexico and Brazil remain exceptions, still governed by progressive leaders, but nearly everywhere else, the momentum has shifted.

What makes this moment different from the pendulum swings of the past is not simply that the right is winning elections. It is what the right is winning elections to do. The conservatives of the 1990s promised modernization, privatization, and fiscal discipline. They spoke the language of markets and efficiency. They wanted to leave history behind. The new reactionary right has brought history roaring back to the center of politics, and it is doing so as a cultural battle, not an economic one. When Lima's mayor Rafael López Aliaga ordered the return of Francisco Pizarro's equestrian statue to the historic center in 2025—a statue that had been removed two decades earlier to make room for symbols of a more diverse society—he did not do so quietly. He did it alongside Madrid's premier Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Pizarro's descendants, turning the restoration into a ceremony about who belongs and what the nation's story should be. The horse was the same. The right was not.

This shift reveals itself across the continent in different registers. Argentina's Milei government renamed Columbus Day back to Día de la Raza and portrayed Columbus's arrival as the beginning of civilization. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil openly defended the military dictatorship and turned its uniforms and ceremonies into political identity. In Peru, Alberto Fujimori's legacy is being rehabilitated. A Catholic and Hispanic tradition is being championed against what the right calls cultural Marxism. Each movement adapts to its own national history, but they are all drawing from the same international repertoire—one that asks, in various ways, which groups have acquired too much influence, too much visibility, too many rights. The Peruvian academic Alberto Vergara has called this phenomenon "reactionary Americas," a term that avoids endless debates about whether each leader is conservative, populist, or far-right, and instead clarifies what is actually happening: a reaction against the civil, political, and social openings that came with democracy and expanded over recent decades.

But reactionary Americas did not emerge from nowhere. It rose because the progressive left, which had occupied positions of power across the continent to an unprecedented degree, failed to solve the problems that matter most to ordinary people. For a moment in the early 2000s, the six largest Latin American economies—Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Peru—were all governed simultaneously by progressive leaders, something that had never happened before. Those governments, buoyed by commodity booms, implemented redistributive policies that improved millions of lives. But they did not transform weak states, informal economies, or fragile public services. Inequality persisted. Crime spiraled. Corruption remained endemic. And when the commodities boom ended, the left had no answer. Parts of the progressive movement began recycling exhausted formulas and came to be seen as a new elite. The old populisms lost their power to inspire. Some of the left's most prominent figures have fallen dramatically: 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; Evo Morales is self-exiled in Bolivia's Chapare region.

The reactionary right has offered something simpler and more visceral: a promise to restore control. Control over borders, over the streets, over the economy. Control that makes tomorrow feel secure and guaranteed. Security has become the central battleground. Organized crime has expanded, and governments have proven unable to contain it. Fear is now 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, states of emergency. Nayib Bukele's mega-prison in El Salvador is not merely a correctional facility; it is a political image whose influence extends far beyond the country's borders. What one journalist calls the "marketing of cruelty" works because hard-line approaches provide immediate symbolic gratification in ways that gradual improvements cannot.

What holds this otherwise disparate movement together is not a coherent governing agenda but a common enemy: progressivism, or what they call "wokeness." Bukele believes the public sector should be better than the private sector. Milei calls the state a pedophile in a kindergarten. Kast is a post-Pinochet national conservative. Their policy platforms contradict each other, but they share an audience eager for hostility toward the left. And they are all drawing from what one observer calls a "great global supermarket of reactionary arguments," where local leaders pick the fears that resonate most with their voters: communism, immigration, gender ideology, electoral fraud, globalist elites. Argentine libertarians, living in a country with no significant Muslim population, nonetheless talk about the Islamization of the West. Each leader adapts the product to fit the market.

The infrastructure of strongman politics has changed, but not its emotional logic. The archetypal Latin American strongman of the 20th century needed a party, an army, trade unions, some form of patronage network. Today's strongman is a celebrity with a direct connection to millions of followers through digital platforms. 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. Donald Trump occupies a central place in this transformation, not because Latin American 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. Reactionary Americas suggests something different: that the strongman was never a peculiarity of the South, but a general temptation within democracy itself.

Yet reactionary Americas is not yet an inevitable destination or a regional regime. Progressive movements retain significant social bases. Institutions in many countries continue to limit political leaders' ambitions. 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 inclusion. 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.