From a distance, Alejo de Gennaro would have fit in at any Trump rally. He wore a MAGA hat and a wide smile as he listened to a parade of speakers slam socialists and decry wokeness.
But the text on Mr. Gennaro’s hat revealed a key distinction: “Make Argentina Great Again,” it read. And Mr. Gennaro, a 23-year-old marketing consultant, was standing in the Buenos Aires Hilton, more than 4,000 miles from the nation that had just elected Donald J. Trump.
He and nearly 2,000 others were drawn to the hotel conference room by the Conservative Political Action Conference, a fixture in the United States that has long handed a megaphone to leaders of the American right.
Now, drafting on the right’s momentum worldwide, CPAC has gone global, aiming to unite right-wing parties and politicians in its traveling showcase. In recent years, the group has held conferences in Brazil, Hungary, Japan, Mexico and, this week, Argentina, where speakers included Javier Milei, the country’s libertarian, budget-slashing president, and Lara Trump, the American president-elect’s daughter in-law and the co-chair of the Republican National Committee.
“We’re taking our countries back,” Ms. Trump told the crowd.
In its latest iteration, CPAC is seeking to build something of a political import-export business, seeding Trumpian politics across the globe while also hunting for ideas for use back home and like-minded leaders to amplify.
While it’s not the first time a group with ties to Mr. Trump has tried to push his brand of populism abroad — Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump adviser, once helped set up a political training academy outside Rome — the high-profile lineup in Buenos Aires demonstrated signs of new momentum.
Mr. Milei, a wild-haired economist who may be the planet’s most recognizable right-wing leader after Mr. Trump, pledged in his keynote speech on Wednesday to “end socialist garbage for once and for all,” to the delight of fans like Mr. Gennaro, who traveled more than 600 miles from his home in Mendoza to see the president. Thanks to Mr. Trump and leaders like himself, Mr. Milei added, “the world is breathing new winds of liberty.”
Other speakers — including Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, and Ben Shapiro, the popular American podcast host — delivered similarly fiery speeches that mixed celebration of Mr. Trump’s victory with dark warnings about the fight against left-wing politics, which many described as a “cultural battle” for the planet’s soul.
Much of that revolved around what speakers called “wokismo” — Spanish for so-called woke ideology — that they said had deeply permeated governments and international organizations like the United Nations, an object of particular scorn. But in at least one place, some said, the war was already tilting heavily in their favor.
“Argentina showed what’s possible,” said Ms. Trump, ticking off Mr. Milei’s accomplishments after one year in office, including eliminating half of the federal ministries, firing tens of thousands of public servants and cutting the nation’s runaway inflation to its lowest rate in years.
Ms. Trump did not mention the toll on the country’s citizens. As social services have been cut, more than half of Argentina’s population of 47 million now lives below the poverty line, the country’s highest rate in more than 20 years.
Still, Mr. Milei’s agenda appears to be something of a blueprint for Mr. Trump. Like Mr. Milei, Mr. Trump has pledged to shrink the federal bureaucracy and drastically reduce the federal budget.
In July, Mr. Milei created a Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation headed by an economist trained at M.I.T. Mr. Trump last month announced the Department of Government Efficiency with a similar mandate, but led by the former pharmaceutical executive and presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.
Mr. Musk, to the disappointment of many in attendance, did not attend CPAC Argentina, but he was praised in several speeches. Kari Lake, the former candidate for Senate and governor in Arizona, thanked Mr. Musk for saving “our First Amendment” by buying the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
She also spoke at length about fentanyl trafficking over Arizona’s border with Mexico, a boundary situated half a planet away from Buenos Aires, and repeated false claims about fraud in the 2020 election. By the time she finished her remarks, half of the crowd had walked out of the conference room, retreating to refreshment tables serving coffee and sweet medialuna pastries.
Other speakers were better received, including Eduardo Verástegui, a Mexican actor who produced the 2023 film “Sound of Freedom.” The film, which depicted child trafficking in Latin America, was popular on the right in the United States, bringing in more than $250 million at the box office and inflaming public concerns about border security.
“It’s always possible to defeat evil no matter how great it is, if the forces of heaven blow in our favor, and the forces of heaven are in Argentina,” Mr. Verástegui said, drawing loud cheers from a crowd largely made up of young men in business attire.
Ticket prices for the daylong event ranged from $100 up to $5,000 — a steep price in a country where the average monthly salary hovers around $1,000.
CPAC is run by the American Conservative Union. The group’s nonprofit arm, which organizes the conferences, brought in $8.2 million in 2023, according to its most recent tax filings.
The A.C.U. has lately come under fire over allegations of impropriety by its chief executive, Matt Schlapp. In May, he settled a lawsuit brought by a political operative who claimed Mr. Schlapp had touched him inappropriately. His settlement was for $480,000, without any admission of wrongdoing.
Mr. Schlapp was onstage in Buenos Aires on Wednesday, cracking jokes and introducing Mr. Milei while digital screens flashed a sign saying “Make the World Great Again.”
Benjamin Gedan, director of the Latin America program at the nonprofit Wilson Center, questioned how closely aligned the Argentine president was with Mr. Trump’s agenda. A dogmatic libertarian, Mr. Milei is opposed to protectionist tariffs that Mr. Trump has threatened, for example.
“The only thing they have in common is being antiwoke,” Mr. Gedan said. “I don’t see this as the backbone of a serious worldwide movement.”
Yet CPAC’s leaders consider the Argentine president proof of concept for its international efforts. Mr. Milei first spoke at its 2022 conference in Mexico when he was a little-known member of Argentina’s lower house of Congress.
He was elected just over a year ago behind an overwhelming surge of popular support from people frustrated with politics as usual and, in particular, with the country’s runaway inflation, which soared to an annual rate of more than 200 percent last year. That’s helped drive his approval rating well above 50 percent, despite his drastic cuts to government services.
“We let the people pick their leaders, but it is about helping to elevate them and giving them a larger platform,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a communications official with the group who is married to Mr. Schlapp. In an interview she claimed CPAC played a significant role in his rise to international prominence.
Just two months after taking office, Mr. Milei attended CPAC’s annual U.S. conference in Maryland, where he met Mr. Trump for the first time, he said. In his remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Milei also credited the group with brokering a private audience with Mr. Trump in Florida in November, making him the first foreign leader to offer Mr. Trump congratulations in person.
Speaking just before Mr. Milei, Eduardo Bolsonaro used the platform to say that his father hoped to run for president again, despite an investigation into the former president’s role in a riot in Brasilia on Jan. 8, 2023, by supporters who denied the country’s election results. That event resembled the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in Washington, and, like Mr. Trump, Mr. Bolsonaro has cast the investigation as the work of a corrupt justice department.
Onstage in Buenos Aires, the younger Mr. Bolsonaro held up photos of people who had been charged in the case. “Free the political prisoners of Brazil,” Mr. Bolsonaro said, drawing one of the evening’s loudest cheers. “If Trump won again, so will Bolsonaro.”
In many ways, the conference represented the culmination of the internationalist vision pushed by Mr. Bannon, who has long stoked the idea that the right-wing agenda should not stop at the U.S. border.
A frequent speaker at CPAC events in the past, Mr. Bannon apologized by video feed for not making it to Buenos Aires, saying his services were required in Washington. He is scheduled to face trial on allegations of fraud in state court in New York in late February.
He and nearly every other speaker put forth Mr. Milei’s policy agenda as a critical test case for the movement. A meme that spread among Argentine social media influencers this week, including one who spoke at CPAC, depicted Mr. Milei as Jesus teaching Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro to fish on the banks of the Sea of Galilee.
“The eyes of the world are on Argentina,” Mr. Shapiro said in a speech that cast the left as “evil.”
“If you succeed, the rest of the world is going to follow you,” Mr. Shapiro said, concluding his speech with Mr. Milei’s trademark catchphrase: “Viva la libertad, carajo,” Spanish for “long live freedom, damn it!”
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