This interview is based on Natalia Marsicovetere’s report contribution, co-authored with Tristán López, ‘Democratic erosion through an anti-gender lens: the influence of Spanish conservative actors in Guatemala’.
This interview was conducted by Pasko Kisić-Merino.
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One of the key issues in “far-right” and “reactionary politics” studies is the conceptualisation of both terms, given their breadth. I feel there is a unique connection in the case of Guatemala (and other countries in Latin America) that ties overt anti-gender or genderphobic discourses, with what you and your co-author label “libertarian conservativism”, Christianity, and the “Iberosphere”. Besides the severe inner contradictions of this “libertarian conservativism”, what do you think distinguishes the Guatemalan case that could problematise and/or expand on the more mainstream conceptualisations of the far-right, reactionary politics, and their normalisation as developed in cases looking at Europe and the US?
In our report, we describe how libertarian conservativism in Guatemala is the seemingly contradictory mix of Christian/Catholic traditional values and libertarian politics. This is the pillar that upholds the neoliberal Guatemalan State; a completely unregulated private sector, under the rule of right-wing economic elites that personify traditional ideology. The hegemony under this neoliberal project weaponizes the general distrust towards the government. In this climate of distrust —a legacy of the 36-year-long internal armed conflict the country endured— they present libertarian rule as crucial for economic stability, the protection of citizens and even for the protection of democracy. In this line, they pin”communism” and leftist social movements* as a threat to the nation in opposition of the ‘stability’ that they promise as part of libertarianism. Younger generations of libertarian conservatives in the region, stemming from trends in national and international conservative academic circles, lean more into secular and “intellectual” discourse even when positioning anti-gender and anti-communist sentiments. It is crucial to observe how the Guatemalan case illustrates that libertarian conservativism is part of a tradition of reactionary politics, not just a reaction or backlash to changes in power dynamics. The private sector and right-wing governments have dominated the history of Guatemala as a republic. In this context, libertarian conservativism is thus, a long-term project to maintain and further concentrate wealth and Christian/Catholic cultural hegemony.
This is in stark difference with the US and Europe, as they used the enrichment amassed through colonial and neocolonial power to build welfare secular states after the World Wars. This socialist and welfare approaches were made possible thanks to the concentration of wealth resulting from Global-South extractivism, which lessened the internal domination of the elite class over their own working class. In recent times, this power dynamic has shifted, and we can observe the same traits that characterise Guatemalan libertarian conservativism emerging in the US and European far-right movements as part of their elite’s long-term projects to continue to amass wealth both within and beyond their own borders.
*As an interesting side note, “populism” in most of Latin America (and sometimes in Spain) is a term frequently used by libertarian conservatives to refer to what they perceive as “communist threat”. The “fight against populism” is a common thread in libertarian conservativist discourse, which is opposite of what is commonly understood as “populism” in most of Europe —illustrating the need to engage with such concepts critically.
Your colleague Nuria Alabao argues that, in the context of influence of the Spanish far-right over Latin American societies, national ultraconservatives manage to turn “each individual battle” into an opportunity to “reshape the hegemony”. My question to you is what is the “hegemony” being reshaped in your case country, according to this project? Moreover, is there a case here for arguing that these “threatened” hegemonic forces and discourses have been crucial in the enabling of reactionary politics rather than outright reshaped by the far-right?
From 2015 onwards, as our case study shows, the Guatemalan political and economic elites faced an ongoing legitimacy crisis. Citizens began a widespread “anticorruption movement” after an international investigation body uncovered several corruption schemes involving high-level government officials. The anticorruption movement was strong. It involved many sectors and quickly became a threat to the status quo, and more significantly, to the neoliberal interests of the government-private sector alliance. Citizens had previously perceived economic elites as caring for the best interest of the country. They even considered them their allies in the fight against corruption. However, the corruption investigations also revealed the involvement of important business leaders in ilicit electoral financing in 2017, and other corruption schemes. The movement then turned against them and became incrasingly defiant of the government regardless of the leading political party.
After this hegemony crisis in Guatemala, the elites needed to rebuild a framework that subdued dissidence and protected their shared neoliberal economic interests. This is why Sonia Côrrea and Nuria Alabao reference the reshaping of the hegemony (under a Gramscian lens) as taking an anti-gender approach. As mentioned above, economic elites have been historically conservative, and thus it is crucial to understand that the anti-gender tactics deployed in this reshaping of the hegemony were not ideologically novel.
What was novel was that politicians put forward explicit anti-gender policies and discourses as part of governing and electoral strategies. Famously, in 2018 President Jimmy Morales “kicked out” the international investigation body that uncovered the corruption schemes. In his speech announcing this move, he stated that he was saving Guatemala from international “gender ideology” and was protecting “life and families”. Elites thus began reshaping hegemony presenting themselves as allies in defending the country from these foreign “threats” that did not belong in a nation built on Christian/Catholic values —and to the surprise of no one, anti-gender tactics were also paired with anti-communist discourse reminiscent of the Cold War.
Thus, the anti-gender tactics deployed in reshaping hegemony were not a new idea introduced by the far-right. Rather, it was a strategy which enabled existing core beliefs of libertarian conservatism and tapped into the predominant Christian/Catholic cultural values that are fertile soil for gender panic. This, at the same time, enabled an entry path for international and national far-right actors into political, economic and even academic spaces.
The reshaping of hegemony under an anti-gender approach also played a fundamental role in the mainstreaming of the far-right in the country, particularly during President Giammattei’s term from 2020 to 2024. This was a period characterized by the deployment of even deeper corruption schemes in the State, the persecution of activists and journalists, the implementation of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTIQ policies, and government alliances with the international far-right.
There is an uncanny resemblance between Guatemala and other Latin American countries regarding the “gender ideology” discourse, the organisational assemblages that sustain it, and the narrative construction of gender roles and material repercussions (e.g., in policy) that it pursues. This form of strategic reactionism is also creeping into the US, quite prominently in Trump’s Christian nationalist circles, which were fundamental for his electoral victory in 2024. In this line, you mention that the US is very influential on Latin America in how we replicate hateful, genderphobic, “pro-life” discourse on our national politics. However, some Latin American genderphobic discourses have also been impactful on US politics, like the case of the influential “don’t mess with our kids” (“con mis hijos no te metas”) movement in Peru. Considering the insights developed in this report – and the key issue of “gender ideology” – how is (or could) the Latin American “brand” of far-right and reactionary gender politics influence our US counterpart? Consequently, what implications could the success of LA-informed US-based anti-gender, reactionary discourses, movements, and policies have for a “global north” increasingly bending to the will of the Trump administration?
This is such an important question. Often, regions like ours are overlooked in their significance and impact on the so-called Global North. It is commonly perceived that influence moves solely from “North to South”. However, our region has historically been a testing ground for counterinsurgency strategies and the development of authoritarian tactics we are seeing in the US and Europe today. Countries that have a neoliberal design like the State of Guatemala can easily employ, develop and refine strategies to protect elite interests, specially while backed by powerful governments like the US who has had a long-standing alliance with Guatemala.
A very recent example of how the massive influence a seemingly small region like Central America can have in the “North” is that of Bukele’s authoritarian tactics in El Salvador. A recent close ally of the US, Bukele has famously held for over 3 years the “regimen de excepción” — a militarized tactic in which in the face of “national security threats”, constitutional rights are lifted, public forces are used indiscriminately and arrests without trial normalised. A mirror tactic has been employed this year by the Trump administration with the deployment of the National Guard as part of the “crackdown on immigration” and the unwarranted arrest without trial of what they describe as “illegal aliens”. The influence of El Salvador even extends to the agreement of holding those arrested in the US in their own ultra-high-security prison.
In the gender reactionary politics realm, we can see how strategies that have been used over the last decade by governments and politicians in Latin America are very similar to what we saw in Trump’s 2023 electoral campaign and current administration. For instance, LGBTQI issues (in the case of the US, particularly trans issues) are framed as a core threat to national (Christian) values. At the same time, economic elites are positioned as key allies that protect everyday citizen’s interests is a very similar “brand” of libertarian conservatism to the one we analyse in the Guatemalan case study. In addition, these forces have the clear goal to promote a more neoliberal State through these tactics, which we are seeing happening in Europe as well.
Following this trend, in which we see the US reshaping hegemony under an anti-gender lens, there will likely be pressure for other powers to join in. We could further see in the “global north” an attempted or real reduction of the welfare state and increased authoritarian tactics, which would go hand-in-hand with anti-gender discourses to reshape hegemony and mainstream the far-right. Again, these changes would all occur in the context of the increased neoliberalisation of States.
The core issue discussed across the study cases is truly fascinating. Research on the internationalisation of the far-right is predominantly focused on transatlantic or intra-European interactions, but it is less often studied in terms of ideological “re-colonisation” (i.e., supported by Spain as a strategic hub of international reactionary politics, with religion and gender as core signifiers). Similarly, ‘lessons’ tend to be exported from the north towards the so-called global south. So, conversely, what lessons can we extract from this unique process of internationalisation into the surge and normalisation of the far-right in the northern hemisphere?
One of the key lessons that we hope can be extracted from our report is precisely that: we need to study and understand the far-right phenomena as an articulated, cross-regional effort, and understand the significance of what has happened in the so-called Global South to understand what we are seeing in the US and Europe today. The internationalization of the far-right does not operate in a vacuum, it settles in (and exacerbates) existing cracks in the social fabrics, political tensions, and institutional crisis both within and across regions.
Another key lesson is that this anti-gender approach that characterizes the international far-right is not a mere “backlash” against the political, legal and cultural wins of the feminist or LGBTIQ movements. We have observed that in the US and Europe there is a common problematization of the issue both in academic and activist circles around this idea. However, we propose an alternative interpretation through the case studies from Latin America and Africa that we include in our report. In these countries, the advancement of such movements reflected in policies are relatively recent and in some cases like that of Guatemala, El Salvador and Kenya they are non-existent. Similarly, the countries studied have remained overwhelmingly culturally conservative. Yet, all of them are witnessing a rise of the far right with a strong anti-gender approach. This showcases that the gender component of reactionary politics is not just a retaliation against progressive values, but is central to building the neoliberal, neocolonial vision of the international far-right.
Finally, a conversation that came up often with my colleagues while working on and presenting this report relates to how the far-right has been able to monopolize popular social concerns while progressive moments seemingly have left such concerns behind. The Guatemala case study as an anti-gender laboratory that attempted (and succeeded to an extent) to bring down the anticorruption movement also sheds light on how there are concerns that are shared by the wider public that could also be harnessed in counternarratives in facing authoritarian threats. There is a lot of nuance to this that deserves to be further explored.
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Natalia Marsicovetere is an independent researcher from Guatemala. She holds an M.Sc. in Social and Cultural Psychology from the London School of Economics, which she completed as a Chevening Scholar (2018/19). Her cross-regional research focuses on the intersection of anti-gender movements and authoritarianism, the role of narratives in social polarization, and resistance movements. Her research is rooted in queer and feminist activism and focuses on knowledge-building for advocacy strategies.
Pasko Kisić-Merino is a Researcher for the PLEDGE Horizon Project (Politics of Grievance and Democratic Governance) at the Department of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. He obtained his PhD in Political Science at Karlstad University and is the former editorial manager for the journal Political Psychology. His main research addresses the intersection of far-right politics, identity formation, neoliberalism, and social media through a Lacanian ontological security approach. His current research focuses on unearthing the emotional dynamics and implications of grievance politics in Europe, and their tenuous relationship with liberal democracy.
Natalia and Pasko are members of the RPRN.
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