Not so long ago, a U.S. military operation to oust the leader of a Latin American country, like the one the Trump administration conducted against President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela on Jan. 3, might have unified the continent in anti-imperialist outrage. Not today. While some leaders, like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, were quick to condemn the intervention as a dangerous precedent of U.S. military intervention, others in the region’s new right-wing vanguard welcomed the move. “This is excellent news for the free world,” said President Javier Milei of Argentina.
The split has been long in the making. For years, the chaos of Venezuela’s collapse and the resulting exodus of nearly eight million people have hung like a specter over the Latin American left. The region’s politics have been shifting to the right, in part as a result. For millions of voters across Latin America, fear of a failed left-wing dictatorship next door has become a more potent electoral force than fear of an authoritarian right — or, for that matter, than the memory of 20th-century coups.
The turn began in 2023 with the victories of figures like Mr. Milei, a chainsaw-wielding, self-professed libertarian, and President Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, a Miami-born banana-fortune heir. Since then, the right has triumphed in around two-thirds of Latin America’s electoral contests. Right-wing candidates look well placed to win elections this year in Peru and Colombia, while in Brazil Mr. Lula faces a tight contest against conservative challengers in his bid for a fourth term. Voters are no longer looking for social utopias; they’re worried about crime and making ends meet.
President Trump has of course put his thumb on the scale; he conditioned a $20 billion bailout on the victory of Mr. Milei’s party in midterm elections in Argentina, endorsed a right-wing candidate in Honduras and tried to pressure Brazil into dropping a criminal case against former president Jair Bolsonaro. But his regional meddling is only one factor among many. Nor can the rightward turn be attributed merely to Latin America’s chronic habit of anti-incumbency. The primary circumstances behind this ascendant generation of right-wing leaders — economic stagnation, criminal expansion, Venezuela’s terrible example — suggest that the current turn might prove more durable than past swings of the pendulum.
To understand this shift, look first at what it replaced. The turn of the century heralded a slew of left-wing populists who capitalized on a desire for change after the free-market economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, whose results often disappointed. This original so-called pink tide was fueled in part by a commodity boom set in motion by China’s industrialization; Latin America’s economies grew at an average annual rate of around 3.5 percent between 2000 and 2014. Governments had money to throw around, and so they did, with leaders like Mr. Lula, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela spending lavishly on social programs and public payrolls.
When the boom faded, centrists and conservatives rose once again in some places like Argentina, Chile and Brazil. But stagnating incomes and weak economic growth swiftly rendered those governments unpopular. The late 2010s brought a wave of social explosions — street protests driven by generations of young people who were more educated than their parents but had found few opportunities to get ahead. Inequality and social justice became the issues of the day. Between 2018 and 2023, voters took their revenge, ousting the incumbent in 20 out of 23 free elections and bringing leftist figures like President Gabriel Boric of Chile and President Gustavo Petro of Colombia to power. But that second, weaker pink tide proved short-lived.
The issues that most worry Latin Americans have evolved in ways that favor the right. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit the region hard, voters’ focus has changed to the basics of life: finding stable work, putting food on the table and, perhaps above all, keeping safe. Before 2000, the drug business was mainly confined to Colombia, Mexico, and isolated regions of Bolivia and Peru. Now, gangs stage deadly turf wars for control of the retail drug market across the hemisphere. They have diversified into extortion, human trafficking and illegal mining, especially of gold. They have penetrated politics and exercise cruel control over the lives of many poorer citizens — people who, as their purchasing power has diminished, often yearn for more capitalism rather than more state regulation.
The two figures who most embody this new right, Mr. Milei and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, offer solutions to these problems that might be more alluring than exportable. On the one hand, by locking up over 1.5 percent of his country’s adult population, Mr. Bukele has slashed the murder rate and won the support of millions of Salvadorans. But El Salvador is a small country that suffered specifically from a problem of armed youth gangs. In the sprawling megacities and gang-governed territories in South America or Mexico, fighting crime requires more sophisticated tools, from better intelligence to better coordination between the police, the courts and the prisons.
Mr. Milei, on the other hand, has promised an economic boom to Argentines by pledging to slash the fiscal deficit and liberate the animal spirits of business. “After years of the political class shackling individual freedoms,” he said in 2024, “today we’re here to shackle the state.” José Antonio Kast, who won his own sweeping victory in Chile’s presidential election last month, has hailed Mr. Milei as “an inspiration and a model to follow to take Chile out of stagnation.” But Argentina has a uniquely idiosyncratic set of problems, namely the pathological mismanagement of the country’s economy by Mr. Milei’s Peronist predecessors, in which a bewildering battery of controls and subsidies produced high inflation, corruption and clientelism. Some of his fixes would not especially apply to Chile — nor to many other countries in the region.
Latin America’s new right may be growing, but it remains loosely heterogeneous. Mr. Milei is a foul-mouthed libertarian; Mr. Bukele is a millennial authoritarian; Mr. Kast is a Catholic arch-conservative. What most unites them, other than populist appeal and a desire to make deals to please Mr. Trump, is a shared anti-woke ideology: hostility to abortion, women’s and gay rights, and what they see as the international human rights industry. Hardly a foundation for a coherent movement.
Venezuela will continue to cast a long shadow over the hemisphere’s politics. If the initial reaction to Mr. Trump’s regime-change efforts in Caracas was muted, it is most likely because the majority of Latin Americans would be relieved to see an end to Venezuela’s rotten dictatorship. If U.S. intervention leads to a stable, prosperous Venezuela, it could bring right-wing leaders even closer to the Trump White House and cement their regional dominance. But the consolidation of Madurismo without Mr. Maduro, with the apparent backing of Mr. Trump, could force these leaders to choose between their patron in Washington and their desire to excise what remains of left-wing autocracy from the continent.
In the end, the durability of Latin America’s latest shift will turn on how successful these leaders are in improving the lives of ordinary citizens, in making them safer and less poor and offering them better services like health care, education and public transport. They may have mastered the art of the political stage, but now, the curtain rises on the far less glamorous theater of good governance.
Michael Reid is the former Americas editor at The Economist and the author of books including “Forgotten Continent: A History of the New Latin America.”
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