Trump 2.0 began, as promised, with an onslaught of dictatorial executive orders—initiating massive deportation sweeps, revoking temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, threatening to rescind birthright citizenship and withdrawing federal recognition of trans people — immediately followed by across-the-board attacks on the core structures of the federal government. 

The dizzying pace confounds journalism as well as sanity; by the time this is published, Elon Musk may have gained (likely illegal) access to still more government systems and Trump may have issued and walked back yet more threats. Already, the pardons of Jan. 6 rioters — including leaders of two far-right organizations who had been serving lengthy prison sentences — have receded from headlines amid ever more breaking news of systemic spending freezes, the firing or coerced retirement of countless government workers and a wholesale assault on the national scientific infrastructure, including the extensive removal of public data from government websites.

Amid this descent into autocratic chaos, it’s increasingly urgent to think internationally as we search for models that can help us understand where we may be headed — both in terms of policy and repression as well as avenues and alliances for resistance. But there isn’t a single contemporary country or historical example that offers a guide, and some of the most useful parallels may not be the most obvious.

Critical analyses of the Trump administration and Project 2025 often reach for European comparisons, whether to Hitler and Mussolini or contemporary far-right actors. But while Republicans’ attacks on immigrants and civil and human rights are in keeping with the policy aspirations of right-wing European parties, their current drive to destroy the federal civil service and scientific infrastructure, and to free far-right organizers who tried to overthrow the government, have no parallel among wealthy, western countries. 

While xenophobia and gender/​sexuality occupy the center stage of Republican rhetoric, the heart of GOP politics has long centered on the exacerbation of social inequality — an economic policy of austerity, social disinvestment and domestic militarization that not even the far-right parties of European countries like Germany, Italy or France would tolerate. The threats that Trump and Musk’s ​“Department of Government Efficiency” pose to Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, as well as the growing restrictions on funding for certain forms of medical care, like abortion and trans health, stand in stark contrast to the universal care systems that are understood as essential aspects of government in other economically developed countries. And while Hungary does offer some parallels, comparing the United States to a small, economically marginal country on the edge of Europe actually highlights how far Trump and Musk have moved the nation away from its global socio-economic peers.

By contrast, several Latin American countries offer more telling predictions of what U.S. authoritarianism may look like — and from nations whose leaders have already formed strong alliances with the U.S. far Right, such as El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Argentinian President Javier Milei and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. All three leaders were invited speakers at the U.S. right-wing conference CPAC last year. But with Trump’s return to office, those regional far-right networks that began outside formal government channels have now become official.

During the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in late January, for example, Milei attacked ​“woke-ism” and defended Musk in a speech that declared a new ​“international alliance” of nations under far-right governments. In early February, Bukele offered to provide space in El Salvador’s prisons for U.S. citizens as well as unauthorized immigrants. Currently in Chile, José Antonio Kast Rist, a presidential candidate from a major party, is running on a combination Trump/​Milei platform that includes a pledge to ​“Make Chile Great Again.”

These emerging alliances echo historical U.S. support for dictators across Latin America. But now they’ve shifted into a new register of mutuality, as strategies and influence no longer just move north to south, but also south to north, and as Trump aspires to govern as the kind of strongman generally associated with the margins of democracy rather than its putative center.

The Trump family’s inauguration weekend venture into crypto currencies, with the $Trump coin that surged and then tanked in value, followed Bukele’s fascination with Bitcoin and his brief attempt to make it a legal national currency. Trump’s threats to weaponize the Justice Department against political rivals and to deploy the military domestically against internal enemies and immigrants both reflect historical U.S.-sponsored repression across Latin America and have contemporary parallels. In 2022, for example, Bukele declared a state of emergency over gang violence, which he then used to militarize the police and prisons, weaponize the judicial system and incarcerate tens of thousands of people — including roughly 3% of all Salvadoran men — with little or no legal process. Over the last 15 years in Mexico, and more recently in Ecuador, high levels of violence related to drug trafficking have similarly led to elevated rates of incarceration and some merger of the military and police.

While actual rates of U.S. violent crime are not particularly high, Trump’s relentless depiction of the country as besieged from within and without set the stage for his declaring a national emergency at the border as part of his inaugural wave of executive orders — a declaration that in itself helped create a national sense of threat regardless of objective reality. Such political uses of manufactured threats also resemble tactics seen in Latin America, as when Argentina’s security minister visited El Salvador last June to learn more about the Bukele government’s approach to mass criminalization and incarceration, despite Argentina’s relatively low crime rates.

But the United States isn’t just adopting authoritarian security models from Latin American countries; the political repression and austerity policies it once imposed on the region are now boomeranging back to us.

The United States has a history of using Latin America for economic policy experimentation, perhaps most notably with the imposition of neoliberalism in Chile under dictator Augusto Pinochet. The role of the CIA in the coup that overthrew Pinochet’s democratically-elected predecessor, former President Salvador Allende, may be well known, but less visibly it also enabled the use of Chile as a test case for the economic model that has since become a requirement for receiving financial assistance from international bodies as well as the dominant economic structure of the United States. It is worth noting that the right-wing Heritage Foundation, the primary authors of the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second administration, has long been committed to the destruction of the social welfare state as an economic model and the development of corporate-centered oligarchic models in the United States and globally.

The extreme austerity of Project 2025 is now being tested in Milei’s Argentina, offering some direct parallels to what the Trump administration has begun to do here. In his first year in office, amid spiraling inflation, Milei both directly and indirectly cut public investments in a wide range of services and infrastructure. Prefiguring Trump’s assaults on the U.S. National Institutes of Health, in 2024 Milei elimination of Diversity, Equity and Iinclusion for Argentina’s national scientific body, CONICET, so severely that grants were revoked and both administrative and research staff lost their jobs. For decades, Argentina’s public universities have been tuition free, but now they face massive budget cuts linked to threats to impose tuition, with strong analogies to the current elimination of Diversity, Equity and Iinclusion, especially public universities, across the United States. Last summer, elimination of Diversity, Equity and Iinclusion designed to bring benefits in line with inflation, echoing the drumbeat of Republican threats to Social Security. And in a parallel to the U.S. elimination of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, Milei closed the Women’s Ministry and dismantled programs to combat gender related violence in a country with elevated levels of femicide.

These policy parallels are not accidental; Milei has openly referenced implementing aspects of Project 2025, offering up Argentina as a policy testing ground for the global far Right. Milei’s policies embody key aspects of Musk’s assaults on the federal infrastructure, including an Argentinian Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation, which a senior Argentinian official suggested as a model for Musk and his coterie. And last week in Washington, D.C., Milei returned to the annual CPAC conference to gift Musk a symbolic, budget-slashing chainsaw — the same prop Milei used during his 2023 presidential campaign.

El Salvador offers another example of a testing ground for anti-democratic strategies. Throughout February, Musk and Bukele have been in ongoing dialogue on X (formerly Twitter) about the judiciary as an obstacle to authoritarian power. This Tuesday, Musk reinforced his threats against the constitutional order by posting that the United States should follow El Salvador’s example in impeaching judges who fulfill their role of holding the executive accountable to the law. ​“The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” wrote Musk. ​“No one is above the law, including judges. That is what it took to fix El Salvador. Same applies to America.”

It’s vital to understand that global right-wing networks like these did not emerge from the rise of far-right governments, but rather prefigured and enabled them. The Heritage Foundation created Project 2025 during the Biden administration and CPAC has been cultivating a wide range of international connections for many years.

It is equally important to understand that, at present, there is no progressive analog to these transnational right-wing networks and alliances, sharing resources, strategies and support. But we need one, and we have both historical examples and active networks to draw from and build upon.

In the 1990 and 2000s, AIDS activists forged transnational campaigns and significantly reorganized access to pharmaceuticals across the Global South. Today, those networks have begun to re-mobilize in response to the Trump-Musk attacks on PEPFAR and USAID. Feminists across the Americas have built similar cross-border alliances around abortion, sharing knowledge and resources in ways that have significantly informed the emerging U.S. response to the post-Dobbs reality. At a recent protest in Argentina, marchers carried signs against Musk as well as their own government, demonstrating a clear analysis of the global nature of the struggle. 

We have much to learn from our Latin American compañeros and compañeras about sustained resistance to strongman governments, economic austerity and militarized repression, as well as how to rebuild after a repressive government has finally been pushed out. A globalized Right must be met by a globalized resistance.

In These Times: https://inthesetimes.com/article/trump-latin-america-models-bukele-milei-bolsonaro

Los modelos latinoamericanos del MAGA

Trump 2.0 comenzó, como se había prometido, con una andanada de órdenes ejecutivas dictatoriales: lanzó redadas masivas de deportación, revocó el estatus de protección temporal para cientos de miles de inmigrantes, amenazó con retirar la ciudadanía por nacimiento y retiró el reconocimiento federal a las personas trans. Esto fue inmediatamente seguido por ataques generalizados contra las estructuras centrales del gobierno federal.

El ritmo vertiginoso de estos eventos desafía tanto al periodismo como a la cordura; al momento de publicarse esto, Elon Musk podría haber obtenido (probablemente de manera ilegal) aún más acceso a los sistemas gubernamentales y Trump podría haber anunciado y luego retractado aún más amenazas. Las amnistías presidenciales a los autores de los disturbios del 6 de enero —incluyendo líderes de dos organizaciones de extrema derecha que cumplían largas condenas— han pasado ya a segundo plano, eclipsadas por nuevas noticias como el congelamiento generalizado de gastos, los despidos masivos o jubilaciones forzadas de muchos trabajadores gubernamentales, y el ataque generalizado a la infraestructura científica nacional, incluyendo la eliminación masiva de datos públicos de sitios web oficiales.

En medio de esta caída hacia el caos autocrático, es cada vez más urgente adoptar una perspectiva internacional cuando buscamos modelos que nos ayuden a entender hacia dónde podríamos estar encaminados, tanto en términos de políticas y represión como de posibles vías y alianzas para la resistencia. No hay un solo país ni un único ejemplo histórico que sirva como guía exacta, y algunos de los paralelos más útiles podrían no ser los más obvios.

Los análisis críticos hacia la administración Trump y el llamado Proyecto 2025 suelen recurrir a comparaciones europeas, ya sea con Hitler y Mussolini o con actores contemporáneos de la extrema derecha europea. Pero si bien los ataques republicanos contra inmigrantes y los derechos civiles y humanos coinciden con las aspiraciones políticas de dichos partidos en Europa, su actual empeño en desmantelar el servicio civil federal y la infraestructura científica pública, así como liberar a activistas de extrema derecha que intentaron derrocar al gobierno, no tiene paralelo real en las democracias avanzadas occidentales.

Mientras la xenofobia y las cuestiones de género y sexualidad ocupan el centro del discurso republicano, la base real de la política del GOP siempre ha sido el agravamiento de la desigualdad social mediante medidas de austeridad económica, desinversión social y militarización interna, algo que ni siquiera los partidos europeos más derechistas (de Alemania, Italia o Francia) tolerarían. Las amenazas del “Departamento de Eficiencia Gubernamental” de Trump y Musk contra Medicaid, Medicare y la Ley de Cuidado Asequible, así como las crecientes limitaciones al financiamiento de la atención médica en áreas como el aborto o la salud trans, contrastan fuertemente con los sistemas universales de atención médica considerados esenciales en otros países economicamente avanzados. Incluso Hungría, presentada muchas veces como caso análogo, subraya—debido a su pequeño tamaño y su economía marginal—cuán lejos han desplazado Trump y Musk a los Estados Unidos del modelo socioeconómico global predominante entre sus aliados tradicionales.

Por el contrario, varios países latinoamericanos ofrecen predicciones mucho más reveladoras sobre cómo podría verse el autoritarismo estadounidense. Y los líderes regionales que ya han formado fuertes nexos con la extrema derecha estadounidense, tales como el presidente de El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, el presidente argentino Javier Milei o el expresidente brasileño Jair Bolsonaro, hoy legitiman dichas relaciones. De hecho, los tres fueron invitados especiales en la conferencia estadounidense de derecha CPAC el año pasado. Con la vuelta de Trump al poder, estas redes regionales pasan ahora a ser oficiales.

Durante el Foro Económico Mundial en Davos en enero pasado, por ejemplo, Milei criticó el “woke-ismo” y defendió a Musk en un discurso donde declaró una nueva “alianza internacional” de países con gobiernos de extrema derecha. A principios de febrero, Bukele ofreció cárceles en El Salvador para ciudadanos estadounidenses y migrantes indocumentados. Actualmente, en Chile, José Antonio Kast Rist, candidato presidencial de un partido importante, combina en su campaña elementos del discurso de Trump y Milei, prometiendo “Hacer a Chile Grande Otra Vez”.

Estas alianzas emergentes recuerdan al histórico apoyo estadounidense a dictaduras en América Latina. Pero ahora se han transformado en relaciones más simétricas, con estrategias e influencias viajando no solo del norte al sur, sino del sur al norte, al mismo tiempo que Trump desea gobernar como el caudillo más usualmente asociado con democracias marginales, en lugar de desde una democracia central y consolidada.

La incursión inicial de la familia Trump en criptomonedas el fin de semana de su inauguración —con el lanzamiento de la moneda virtual $Trump que rápidamente subió y luego cayó en valor— siguió los pasos de Bukele en El Salvador, cuya fascinación por el Bitcoin lo llevó en su momento a intentar implementar esa criptomoneda como moneda nacional. Por su parte, las amenazas de Trump de utilizar al Departamento de Justicia contra rivales políticos o desplegar al ejército contra enemigos internos reproducen las formas tradicionales de represión patrocinadas históricamente por EE.UU. en toda América Latina, así como en casos más recientes. Por ejemplo, en 2022 Bukele instauró un régimen de excepción por la violencia pandillera, que aprovechó para militarizar la policía y prisiones, instrumentalizar el sistema judicial, y encarcelar a decenas de miles de ciudadanos sin garantías legales. Países como México y Ecuador también han seguido la militarización ante el crimen organizado.

Aunque los índices reales de violencia en Estados Unidos no sean particularmente altos, la incesante retórica de Trump sobre un país sitiado preparó el terreno para declarar una “emergencia nacional” en la frontera, lo cual contribuyó a una percepción artificial de amenaza nacional. Estos usos políticos de amenazas artificiales también se observan en América Latina; por ejemplo, cuando el ministro argentino de seguridad visitó El Salvador para aprender sobre sus métodos represivos pese a la baja tasa de criminalidad argentina.

Pero no es solo en seguridad autoritaria donde EE.UU. está aprendiendo de la región: las mismas políticas económicas de austeridad que Estados Unidos históricamente impuso en América Latina ahora regresan como un búmeran. El modelo neoliberal impuesto en Chile bajo la dictadura pinochetista —apoyada por la CIA— sirvió de ensayo para muchas políticas posteriormente adoptadas en EE.UU.

Actualmente, la extrema austeridad del Proyecto 2025 es experimentada por Milei en Argentina, quien ya llevó a cabo profundas reducciones del sector público y desmanteló programas sociales, científicos y educativos, ofreciendo un inquietante espejo a las acciones del gobierno de Trump y Musk contra la infraestructura federal estadounidense, incluyendo la eliminación de programas de Diversidad, Equidad e Inclusión.

Bukele en El Salvador nuevamente ilustra una estrategia autoritaria en el ámbito judicial que Musk ha citado explícitamente en sus amenazas contra los tribunales estadounidenses.

Actualmente no existe una red global progresista que pueda equipararse a estas redes conservadoras transnacionales. Pero sí existen antecedentes históricamente exitosos como las campañas contra el VIH/SIDA y redes feministas regionales que ya han mostrado capacidad efectiva de resistencia conjunta.

Nuestros compañeros y compañeras latinoamericanos tienen mucho que enseñarnos sobre cómo resistir de manera sostenida ante gobiernos represores y cómo reconstruir cuando finalmente logremos detenerlos. Frente a una derecha globalizada, necesitamos también una resistencia globalizada.

In These Times: https://inthesetimes.com/article/trump-latin-america-models-bukele-milei-bolsonaro