Craig Johnson has a PhD in history from the University of California Berkeley, where his work focused on the right wing and the Catholic Church in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Spain. He hosts a podcast called Fifteen Minutes of Fascism, a weekly news and analysis show covering the global rise of the radical right.
Brazilian president Lula da Silva knows the dangers of the far right all too well, and during his visit to the US last week he laid out exactly how to defeat such reactionaries: not by striving for a false unity but by confronting the foes of democracy head-on.
On January 8, far-right supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the seat of Brazil’s government in a scene reminiscent of the US Capitol riot. But President Lula, unlike the US government, is swiftly cracking down on the perpetrators.
With her sentencing on corruption charges this month, Argentine vice president Cristina Kirchner has become the latest victim of right-wing “lawfare.” Kirchner has declared she won’t seek public office again — meaning a murky future for her populist movement.
Republicans didn’t get their predicted “red wave” in the November midterms, but the results were hardly a repudiation of the Right: most of Donald Trump’s endorsed candidates won their races, and the GOP continues to make inroads with voters of color.
Last week, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro filed a complaint with Brazil’s highest court on election law, claiming buggy voting machines denied him victory in October’s election. The court ruled against him — but like Trump, Bolsonaro won’t admit defeat anytime soon.
This year’s GOP congressional candidates are more racially diverse than ever, and the party is making worrisome inroads among voters of color. Democrats have never understood that without a substantive appeal to voters of color, those voters may leave them.
Alicia Raboy was a revolutionary in 1970s Argentina who was disappeared by the state during its anti-leftist crackdown. What would the world have been like if activists like her, in Latin America and around the world, hadn’t been murdered by the state?
Over the weekend in Brazil, a leftist official backing Lula’s presidential bid was killed by a supporter of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. It’s a chilling reminder of the far right’s willingness to use violence to fight the Left.
An open letter by retired generals warns French president Emmanuel Macron that unless he clamps down on anti-racist movements, the armed forces will step in to “restore order.” In a country with a long history of military coups, the spread of far-right talking points is undermining democracy.
The Left’s strategy for fighting the Right isn’t constant — it depends on which segment of the right-wing coalition is dominant at any given time.
The victory of Evo Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo party in Bolivia is a triumph for democracy and a rebuke to the right-wing coup plotters. But Bolivia now faces some serious questions: How will the country engage with these recent atrocities perpetrated by the Right? And what will happen to those who committed them?
Since the turn of the millennium, Argentina has been hobbling from debt crisis to debt crisis. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, the country is set to default for the third time in twenty years — an event that would plunge the country into chaos.
The United States’ COVID-19 response has paled in many respects to Argentina’s. But it’s not just Argentina’s public health response that the United States should learn from — it’s also the country’s history of popular resistance that will be crucial to fighting unequal and undemocratic responses to the pandemic.