“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is not, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
Table of Contents
Questions
- Why did Milei hand Elon Musk a chainsaw at CPAC in 2025, and what does that image stand for?
- How did the Pink Tide governments of the early 2001-2015 see the role of the State, and what led to their decline?
- What is the Atlas Network, and what role did it play in the rise of figures like Milei?
- How did Trump step into elections and politics in Brazil, Honduras, Argentina, and Colombia?
- What did Folha de S.Paulo reveal about WhatsApp in Brazil’s 2018 election?
- Who were the «farm bots», and how do they connect the right-wing campaigns of several countries?
- Why was Macri’s 2018 IMF loan historic, and what did the IMF itself later conclude about it?
- How did Argentina’s public debt change between 2015 and 2019, in dollars and as a share of GDP?
- Besides outside influence, what failures of the left helped the right win?
- What explains Lula’s comeback in October 2026, and why does the essay call it “a stop, not a reversal”?
A chainsaw for a gift
The northern laboratory
During the Cold War, Washington exported its «National Security» doctrine to Latin America through the School of the Americas, the CIA, and the generals. In the 21st century, the method changed, but the direction of the flow did not. The new export is not the coup d’état. It is the think tank, the conference, the influencer, and the algorithm.
Consider the Atlas Network. Founded in 1981 by the British businessman Antony Fisher, it grew from 15 think tanks in nine countries in the mid-1980s to 457 in 96 countries by 2020. About 100 are in Latin America, including ten in Argentina. Milei was not born in a cave: he sat on the advisory board of an Atlas affiliate, worked with others, and received the Liberty Prize from Fundación Atlas in 2018. A 2017 investigation by The Intercept described the network as a quiet extension of U.S. foreign policy, with affiliated think tanks receiving money from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, and grants flowing to the libertarian groups that filled Brazil’s streets against Dilma Rousseff.
Then came CPAC, the annual gathering of the US conservative movement, which discovered that it, too, could be franchised. In June 2022, before Milei or Kast were presidents, Milei (Argentina), José Antonio Kast (Chile), and Eduardo Bolsonaro (Brazil) shared the same stage at the Brazilian edition. CPAC Brasil is organized by Eduardo Bolsonaro’s own institute, and Eduardo had been named by Steve Bannon in 2019 as the Latin American representative of his «Movement.» Milei, his vice president Victoria Villarruel, Kast, and Eduardo Bolsonaro signed a Madrid Charter promoted by Spain’s Vox against «communism» in the Ibero-sphere. None of this is secret, and none of it is illegal. That is precisely the point.
Washington has used more aggressive tactics when diplomacy was not enough. For example, in July 2025, President Donald Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods and Magnitsky Act sanctions on Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The purpose of these actions was to stop what Donald Trump referred to as the «witch hunt» against former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is being investigated for attempting a coup. Reports at the time said the tariff threats came after Eduardo Bolsonaro (Jair Bolsonaro’s son), who had moved to the United States, lobbied a foreign government to impose punitive tariffs on Brazilian coffee growers to protect his father from legal proceedings in Brazil. This is an excellent example of how direct personal interest can be aligned with some idea of patriotism.
In Honduras, two days before the November 2025 election, Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura and announced he would pardon former president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted in New York of helping move some 400 tonnes of cocaine into the United States. He added that Washington would not be «throwing good money after bad» if Asfura lost. Asfura won; Hernandez was pardoned and liberated. In Argentina, before the October 2025 midterms, he said of Milei: «If he doesn’t win, we’re gone.» In Colombia, in 2026, he gave Abelardo de la Espriella his «Complete and Total Endorsement.»
In the old days, the CIA bribed newspapers and the ambassador whispered to the generals. Now the president of the United States says it out loud, on his own social network, and calls it freedom.
The bald Argentine and the factories of indignation
A new type of soldier for a new kind of war. The right needed tanks in the 1970s. Today, it needs phones. The new battlefield is the screen, and the new soldiers are accounts, some human, many not.
In 2018 Brazil was the laboratory for the new right’s war. On October 18, 2018, ten days before the presidential runoff in which Jair Bolsonaro was elected, the journalist Patrícia Campos Mello revealed in Folha de S.Paulo that several businessmen, including the owner of the department store chain Havan, had purchased mass-messaging packages on the WhatsApp platform to send hundreds of millions of messages to voters of the Workers’ Party. WhatsApp immediately banned the accounts. The election was not annulled. The journalist became the target of a campaign of harassment.
Brazil was the laboratory. From there, the know-how spread. Most prominent among the commercial travelers of the new right was the Argentine Fernando Cerimedo, founder of the website La Derecha Diario, who was affectionately called by the supporters of Jair Bolsonaro “o argentino careca” (the bald Argentine). His resume includes work for Patricia Bullrich, Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei, most recently as Milei’s chief digital strategist for the 2023 elections. Later on, he worked for the campaign of Nasry Asfura in Honduras, and today he is the adviser of the new president of Bolivia, Rodrigo Paz.
The lie about the Brazilian voting machines being rigged by the Brazilian Electoral Court was first spread by the Argentine Fernando Cerimedo, founder of the site La Derecha Diario, in a livestream from Buenos Aires on November 2022, after Lula had been elected president. The Brazilian Federal Police later placed Cerimedo in the core of the coup plot, which was accused of spreading “disinformation and attacks on the electoral system.” In the end, Cerimedo was cleared of any wrongdoing in that case, according to reports by MercoPress, while Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison.
The story gets even worse. In August 2026 Cerimedo was arrested at Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, accused by his former partner Nadia Beller of ordering the attempt on her life. His lawyers are defending him. The story contains a wounded lawyer, wads of cash, a possible “bot farm” and tons of corruption allegations. It also contains links to Chile where another investigation into alleged computer offenses in the 2020 constitutional referendum is underway. Beller also says that the audio leaks in the bribery scandal at the disability agency (ANDIS) in Argentina came from Cerimedo’s circle. Milei says that the case against his former adviser is part of a regional plot led by Lula.
Whether or not the acts of the defendants will be classified as crimes in the respective countries, the methods used by the same persons to spread the same content (“fraud”, “communism”, “freedom”) via the same tools in several countries worldwide are already a matter of historical fact. The techniques used are old. Goebbels would have recognized them immediately. The scale, the speed and the costs involved are new. A rumor can now be spread worldwide within hours by a single person with a laptop and a few thousand fake accounts.
And the platforms are not neutral pipes. Their business model is to make money from the rage of their users, and the most profitable users are not the most informed ones but the most furious ones.
The return of the creditor
In 2005 and 2006, Argentina and Brazil paid off their debts with the International Monetary Fund ahead of schedule. It was as much a political gesture as a financial one: the Fund had authored the recipes that ended in Argentina’s 2001 collapse, the biggest default in the IMF’s history. For a decade, the word «IMF» was almost an insult in Buenos Aires.
Mauricio Macri arrived in December 2015 promising «a rain of investments.» Instead, a rain of debt followed. Argentina returned to international markets, paid the vulture funds, and issued bonds at a pace that impressed even Wall Street, including a 100-year bond. By May 2018, with the peso collapsing and the «rain» evaporating, Macri knocked on the door he had promised never to open.
In June, the IMF approved a $50 billion standby program. In September it raised it to $57.1 billion, the largest loan in the Fund’s history, equivalent to 1,227 percent of Argentina’s IMF quota. The Fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde, celebrated it. Two days earlier, the Atlantic Council had given Macri its Global Citizen Award. As the financial press reported at the time, his warm relationship with Donald Trump, whose country holds the largest vote on the IMF board, had helped smooth the way. To its critics, the loan was less an economic program than an electoral one, designed to keep a friendly government in power in 2019.
It failed anyway. Macri lost. Argentina received $44.5 billion before the next government refused the rest. Much of it left the country as quickly as it arrived, through capital flight. In December 2021 the IMF itself concluded that its record program «did not deliver on its objectives». Nobody went to jail. Nobody returned the money. The bill was passed to the children of Argentina, who had not been born when it was signed.
The numbers are simple. Gross public debt rose from $240.7 billion in December 2015 to $337.3 billion in December 2019, a 40 percent increase in four years. As a share of GDP it went from 52.6 percent to 90.2 percent, the highest in at least 14 years. In 2022, the Peronist government of Alberto Fernández signed a new $44 billion program, not to receive fresh money but to refinance the old one. The debtor had become a hostage.
Then came Milei, the man with the chainsaw, who promised to «blow up» the Central Bank. In April 2025, the IMF approved a new $20 billion Extended Fund Facility, Argentina’s 23rd program since 1958, consolidating the country as the Fund’s largest debtor by far. Six months later, with the peso sinking again before the midterms, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a $20 billion currency swap and, in an unusual move, directly bought Argentine pesos. The Council on Foreign Relations called it the first large-scale U.S. rescue since the Clinton administration. Trump made clear that the help depended on the vote. Milei’s party won 40.8 percent.
To be fair to the facts, Milei’s shock did what shocks do in the short term: monthly inflation fell sharply, from an annual peak of 289 percent in April 2024 to about 32 percent by September 2025, and the government posted a fiscal surplus. But the price of utilities, transport, health and education soared, tens of thousands of public jobs were eliminated, and the stability rests, once again, on dollars borrowed from abroad. The libertarian who promised to free Argentina from the State has tied it more tightly than ever to two foreign creditors: the IMF and the U.S. Treasury.
This is the paradox of the new libertarianism in Latin America: it hates the State, except when the State is American and lends it money.
Chainsaws, prisons and the gospel of freedom
Every wave needs a prophet and a model. The prophet was Milei, the self-described «anarcho-capitalist» who insults journalists and quotes Murray Rothbard as if he were Saint Paul. The model was Nayib Bukele, who once called himself «the coolest dictator in the world» and filled mega-prisons with tens of thousands of young men under a state of exception that suspended due process. One sold freedom from the State; the other sold safety through the State. That the two promises contradict each other did not matter. Both sold the same thing: the punishment of someone else.
After 2023, the wave grew into a tide
- Chile (December 2025). José Antonio Kast won the runoff with 58 percent, the first president since 1990 to openly defend the Pinochet dictatorship. At his party, a young supporter wore a red cap that read «Make Chile Great Again.» Colonization is complete when the colonized buy the hat.
- Bolivia (October 2025). Rodrigo Paz won with 54.5 percent, ending almost twenty years of MAS governments, amid fuel shortages and the worst inflation in decades. Both runoff candidates promised to restore relations with Washington. His digital adviser, as we saw, was Cerimedo.
- Honduras (December 2025). Asfura was declared the winner with 40.27 percent against 39.53 percent after a 24-day count, a blank screen in the middle of the night, and fraud allegations. Trump’s candidate won; Trump’s pardoned narco-president went home.
- Venezuela (January 2026). On January 3, US forces bombed Caracas and captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, flying them to New York to face narco-terrorism charges. Trump said the United States would «run» Venezuela and tap its oil. Whatever one thinks of Maduro (and there is much to think), the Monroe Doctrine had stopped pretending.
- Colombia (June 2026). Abelardo de la Espriella, a millionaire who had never held office, defeated Iván Cepeda by one percentage point, promising to apply Bukele’s playbook and join Trump’s «Shield of the Americas.»
- Peru (June 2026). Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the convicted former dictator, won on her fourth attempt with 50.135 percent, about 50,000 votes out of 18 million. She will be Peru’s tenth president since 2016.
To be fair to the facts (and a historian who isn’t fair to the facts is merely a propagandist with footnotes), the right didn’t win only because of bots and Washington. It won because the left gave it material. Venezuela’s collapse sent millions into exile and became the perfect bogeyman for every campaign from Santiago to Tegucigalpa. In Colombia, studies linked Gustavo Petro’s «total peace» to the expansion of armed groups. Bolivia’s MAS devoured itself in a fratricidal war between Evo Morales and Luis Arce while the dollars ran out. Crime and extortion grew across the region, and progressive governments often answered fear with sociology. When a mother is afraid to let her son walk to school, a lecture on structural causes sounds like an insult. The right offered a simple answer: an enemy, a wall, and a prison.
But the wave also met resistance where it least expected it. In November 2025, Ecuadorians, governed by the Trump-friendly Daniel Noboa, rejected a referendum to allow foreign military bases on their soil by about 60 percent. People can vote for a right-wing president and still refuse to rent their country.
The ideology underneath has not changed since the 1990s. It is the same neoliberalism, only angrier. In the 1990s it wore a suit and spoke of «modernization» and the «Washington Consensus.» Today it wears a leather jacket, shouts using TikTok, and speaks of «freedom.» The recipe is identical: privatize, deregulate, open the economy, cut social spending, criminalize protest, and borrow in dollars. The difference is that, this time, the poor are asked to applaud their own adjustment, and many do.
Brazil, October 2026: the wave breaks on a rock
By mid-2026, the script seemed written. Jair Bolsonaro was in prison, but his eldest son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, had inherited his name, his party and his voters. In December 2025, Lula led him by 23 points in runoff polls; by April 2026, the gap had closed to a statistical tie. On October 4, Flávio won the first round with 47.03 percent against Lula’s 45.16 percent, carrying 15 of 27 states, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. The polls had undervalued him by five points. On the prediction markets, bettors gave him about an 85 percent chance of winning the runoff. The financial press was already writing the obituary of the Latin American left.
Three weeks later, on October 25, Lula won with 51.79 percent against 48.21 percent, a margin of about 4.4 million votes. Since Brazil’s return to democracy, no candidate who finished second in the first round had ever won the runoff. Between the two rounds, Lula added 10.38 million votes; Flávio, 3.72 million. Abstention fell from 21.08 percent to about 19.2 percent, bringing almost three million more Brazilians to the polls. Lula swept all nine Northeast states and won the capitals of São Paulo and Rio. A man about to turn 81, whom the experts had interred on October 4, won his fourth presidential election.
What happened? Analysts point to a revitalized grassroots campaign, youth mobilization, and a shift toward digital campaigning. In other words, the left finally decided to fight on the same field where it had been losing for a decade. Brazilians also had a recent memory that Argentines, Chileans and Hondurans lacked: they had already lived four years under a Bolsonaro, through a pandemic that killed more than 700,000, and had watched his followers storm the institutions in Brasília on January 8, 2023. Flávio praised Milei and Bukele as models; in the runoff, his opponents used both names as cudgels against him.
And there was Trump. The 50 percent tariff of 2025, designed to rescue the father, ended up helping his adversary. Lula’s approval, which had been falling, rose after the tariff war began, and he wore a cap with a new slogan: sovereign Brazil. Nationalism, which the new right had monopolized, briefly changed sides. The empire, too, can be counterproductive when it forgets to hide.
The ending was familiar. Flávio Bolsonaro refused to concede and announced that he would seek to annul the election over a last-minute extension of voting hours. Donald Trump Jr. suggested judicial malpractice. Two days after the runoff, Flávio left for the United States. The fraud narrative, born in a 2022 Buenos Aires livestream, had become a family tradition.
Is this the end of the wave? Probably not. It is a stop, not a reversal. Brazil’s right won the first round, holds enormous power in Congress, and the polls underestimated it twice. Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras and El Salvador are governed by the right. The structures that produced the wave (the networks, the money, the platforms, the debt) remain intact. What Brazil showed is something simpler and more important: that the wave is not a law of nature. It can be stopped, at least for a while, when enough people remember what they have already lived.
History does not move in a straight line. It moves like the sea: every wave that advances also prepares its own retreat. The question for the next decade is not whether the tide will turn again, but whether, when it does, the left will have anything new to say, or will simply wait, as it did in the 1990s, for the right to fail on its own.
The neoliberals of the 1990s promised that the market would bring prosperity. The libertarians of the 2020s promise that it will bring freedom. In both cases, the bill arrived in dollars, and the people paid it in years.
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