Robert Quintero asks if Latin America's ultra-right surge is a new boom or just a fleeting episode.
1. 'Diálogos Nuestroamericanos' is the inaugural broadcast of a new radio programme on La Pedagógica Radio produced in alliance with the CLACSO working group 'El Estado como Contradicción.'
2. The panel includes Rodolfo Gómez (political science and communication, University of Buenos Aires), Paulina Barrera (researcher, UNAM Institute of Legal Research), and host Robert Adrián Quintero (Colombia), with Alejandro moderating from La Pedagógica Radio.
3. The episode's central question is whether the current wave of right-wing and ultra-right governments and movements in Latin America represents a consolidated new phenomenon or a conjunctural episode.
4. Gómez opens with a structural argument: both progressivism and the ultra-right are forms that capitalism assumes in different crisis moments, and the state itself is a form produced by the capital-labour social relationship rather than a neutral institutional actor.
5. He argues that the progressive governments of the early 2000s emerged from cycles of struggle against neoliberalism and that their eventual limits were set by the same capitalism they partially contested.
6. Gómez links the current ultra-right moment to three structural factors: the unresolved 2008 capitalist crisis, the pandemic's political effects, and the erosion of US-led hegemony as the guarantor of global capitalist order.
7. He characterises the new right as a force that, unlike the neoliberal right of the 1990s, does not seek hegemony or political dialogue but instead 'violates the form of political domination,' building a kind of state of exception.
8. Gómez illustrates via Argentina: the Menemist right of the 1990s built genuine popular consensus around convertibility; the Milei phenomenon, by contrast, he characterises as a 'lumpen' rather than 'plebeian' phenomenon, less a mass social base than a mobilisation of ideologically available middle sectors and media-aligned discourse.
9. He traces the right-winging of Argentine media to a rupture with the Kirchner governments beginning in 2008 and argues that this produced a mid-culture (mid-cult, following Dwight MacDonald and Umberto Eco) anchored to Republican anti-progressivism.
10. Barrera insists the left-right distinction retains analytical value because its minimum irreducible content is a single question: whether human inequalities are natural and ineradicable (right) or constructed and contestable (left).
11. She identifies two simultaneous phenomena to distinguish: the internal transformation of right-wing ideology and values, and the expansion of right-wing presence in the public sphere across multiple geographies.
12. Barrera outlines three novelties that characterise contemporary rights: first, they have adopted protest aesthetics and social mobilisation forms previously associated with the left and popular movements.
13. Second, contemporary rights operate within—but manipulate—juridical and constitutional limits; multiple legal and sociological currents have documented how constitutional margins are used to incapacitate political opponents.
14. Third, current right-wing movements prioritise contesting historical meanings and common senses, including the discourse of human rights and the memory of authoritarian pasts in which right-wing actors were implicated.
15. Barrera argues that the right's most effective mobilising mechanism is the exploitation of fear: economic precarity and uncertainty about changing social norms—gender, race, identity—are channelled into support for a return to past certainties.
16. She illustrates this with a recent attack at a UNAM high school by a self-described incel who killed a classmate; she connects the attack to visible incel networks in Mexico and to the broader political management of young men's anxieties.
17. On the closing question of how to build a popular counter-agenda, Gómez argues the prerequisite is putting capitalism itself back on the left's agenda and conducting an 'autocritical balance' of progressivism's own reproduction of capitalist relations.
18. Barrera argues the academy and university have a specific role: to listen seriously to students' concerns, resist the right's resignification of human rights and historical memory, and make room for historically oppressed groups in public debate.
19. Listeners interested in Latin American political analysis, the sociology of the ultra-right, or debates within CLACSO about the state and capitalism will find substantial material in this episode.
20. Those seeking news coverage rather than academic debate, or listeners unfamiliar with Latin American political history from the 1960s onward, may find the discussion dense.
