On Dec. 4, 2024, the new and not-so-new leaders of the global far right gathered at the Hilton Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the foreign edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Amid handshakes, smiles and selfies, the event’s participants conjured the specter of an existential war.
The right-wing confab, which has gained more relevance in recent years — and recently hosted President Donald Trump and his senior adviser, Elon Musk, in a Lollapalooza-style event — was brought to Argentina, a nation of 47 million that has previously been a bastion of progressive politics but has recently made a sharp right turn, electing the “anarchocapitalist” economist Javier Milei as president in 2023.
CPAC started in the United States and remains based there, but has made international summits a regular feature. The first was held in Japan in 2017. Since then, the event has been exported to Hungary, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. The Buenos Aires stage featured lawmakers, think tank leaders and former politicians from Latin America, Europe and the U.S., as well as Argentine podcast hosts, activists and social media personalities — all of whom spoke for a full day that followed a tight schedule. A notably enthusiastic audience, primarily young and male, cheered as these speakers took the stage.
The participants wore suits and T-shirts, ties and baseball caps, shot selfies between talks and feasted on offerings from the buffet: Caesar salad, mac and cheese and other signature American dishes. In the pop-up library of a far-right think tank at the auditorium entrance, participants whipped through books with words like “globalism,” “idiots,” “left” and “war” in their titles. The dimly lit auditorium was dominated by a stage illuminated with the red, white and blue of the U.S. flag.
The atmosphere was charged with euphoria about Trump’s victory in November. With his inauguration on the horizon, the proceedings felt like a roadmap for what was about to unfold: the withdrawal of Argentina and the U.S. from the World Health Organization, the intensification of anti-LGBTQ+ and antienvironmentalist agendas and the slashing of assistance programs worldwide after the arrival of Trump — and Musk — to the White House.
The narrative of good versus evil in a world censored by “wokeism” was pervasive at CPAC Argentina. The event radiated excitement and a sense of triumph. Some panels looked like a casting call for future conservative leaders: Politicians from countries currently ruled by center-left administrations spoke about taking their countries to the right. The list included Pablo Viana from the National Party of Uruguay; Rafael Lopez Aliaga, the mayor of Lima, Peru; Fernando Sanchez Ossa, a lawmaker from the Republican Party of Chile; and the politician Eduardo Verastegui from Mexico.
Argentina’s own President Milei, who has become an icon of the global far right, proudly hosted the forum. He won election by promising voters — who were tired of conventional (non)solutions to their recurring economic problems — that he would slash the state, dismantle the central bank and bury the political system (or “caste,” as he calls it) forever. His chainsaw — the signature of his presidential campaign — has caught fire: Musk wielded it at the CPAC gathering in Maryland in February this year, with Milei cheering him on from behind.
Once dismissed as a political outsider with an erratic streak, Milei was now at the nerve center of an international political project, shaping its language as much as its ambitions. His assertion that he is leading a battle “to end, once and for all, the socialist crap” prompted wild cheers.
Milei opened his CPAC speech with an eccentric touch, greeting the audience by saying “hola a todos” (hello everybody) in a creepy, alluring bass voice — a habit he’s developed by mimicking a song from La Renga, a local rock band that has repeatedly asked him not to use their music for his benefit. (“Anyone can dance to and sing our songs,” the band said in a statement, “but it’s legally and morally wrong to use the songs for personal or political gain — no true follower of La Renga would do that.”)
This unsettling quirk, which goes back to Milei’s 2023 presidential campaign, has intensified since he took office. Back then, little was said about “Dark MAGA,” the dystopian, aggressive aesthetic the alt-right has come to embrace. Milei has contributed to and come to symbolize that vibe. His bass voice and AI-powered images of him posing as a lion or as the Terminator destroying communist symbols and liberating people excite his supporters and repulse his critics.
After smirking proudly, he proceeded to deliver his prepared remarks and called on CPAC participants to coordinate globally to block the cracks through which “lefties” can “enter.” His solution: the creation of a “right-wing international.”
CPAC is a strange institution, a hybrid between a political assembly and a festival. Unlike a United Nations or European Union conference, it’s a private event funded by private institutions. But those in attendance are rising stars in many countries around the world, bolstering unofficial connections that are, nonetheless, relevant to their role as political outsiders (even when they hold office, which they do in many cases). After all, if an outsider like Trump can take on the establishment and become the establishment, why not them?
Institutions that once served as platforms for international dialogue — the U.N., the EU, climate conferences — have lost relevance in recent years, giving way to “presidential diplomacy,” according to Federico Merke, an international relations professor at San Andres University in Argentina.
“Presidential diplomacy depends on the branding that each president creates for himself,” Merke told New Lines following the Buenos Aires CPAC summit. Given Milei’s antagonism toward the institution of the state, it’s hardly surprising that he prefers gatherings with like-minded figures over more conventional state-centered forums, Merke said.
Founded in the mid-1970s, CPAC gathers conservative politicians and business leaders to discuss policies, cultivate leadership and shape the discourse of the right. The conference has grown dramatically from just a few hundred attendees in its early years to more than 15,000 in recent times.
“CPAC’s mission is to unite leaders on every continent,” said Mercedes “Mercy” Schlapp, a former Trump adviser and one of the event’s organizers, speaking to New Lines outside the auditorium during a press round at the Buenos Aires gathering. “Trump said his political career started in CPAC [in 2013]. Just imagine! He gets how important it is to find the next freedom leaders in the world, those who will shine the light.”
Schlapp, who served as director of strategic communications in the White House during Trump’s first term, is married to Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which organizes CPAC conferences. A prominent advocate of right-wing ideas in the U.S. and abroad, Matt Schlapp was accused of sexual misconduct by a male staffer for a Republican senator in 2022. The lawsuit was suddenly withdrawn in 2024, following what reports indicated was a private financial settlement. A month into the second Trump presidency, Schlapp allegedly assaulted another man at a Virginia bar. But his CPAC Argentina speech conveyed none of this turbulence, as he and his wife opened the event with uplifting rhetoric: “Donald Trump wants us to be happy, and for civilization to prosper — and there’s an enemy — the bad guys.”
The participants, who occupied the hundreds of seats before the stage (while the press was relegated to the floor at the back of the large room), applauded and erupted with enthusiasm as speakers denounced the “socialist cancer,” the “Soviet drift of transnational institutions” and “corrupt elites.”
The gathering provided vindication for those who have long felt censored or canceled, such as Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who could not leave his country to attend the event in person due to a then-ongoing investigation into coup-plotting to overturn the results of Brazil’s 2022 presidential elections. Bolsonaro, who was barred from office until 2030 for abuse of power and spreading misinformation, was formally charged for crimes against Brazil’s democracy in February 2025. The indictment accuses Bolsonaro and his associates of plotting to dismantle the government and assassinate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known simply as “Lula”), the country’s then-president-elect, in 2022.
The Buenos Aires event also felt like the culmination of something that had been simmering in Argentina for a while — a release valve for viewpoints many believed had long been silenced.
“Trump’s [first] victory and Brexit changed everything,” Merke said. “These events empowered Western world leaders with ideological affinity and pushed a backlash against progressive ideas that they believed ‘went too far.’”
Milei was virtually unknown to most Argentines just four years ago. His rise to prominence can be attributed to several factors: his opposition to public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, his proposals to slash the Argentine state and to improve Argentina’s long-struggling economy and widespread disillusionment with traditional politics and elected officials.
His party, La Libertad Avanza (“Freedom on the March”), won two seats in the Chamber of Deputies in 2021. Milei then rapidly grew in popularity with the support of orthodox economists, powerful business owners and traditional media outlets — the very same establishment forces he pledged to dismantle. Voters, thirsty for alternatives in a country with ferocious and intractable inflation, elected him with over 55% of the vote.
In his first year as president, Milei cut public programs and reduced government spending to a bare minimum. His administration slashed the number of ministries by more than half and dismantled social security policies, women’s initiatives, diversity protections and pension benefits. But he delivered on one of his main campaign promises, which was why many Argentines voted for him: He flattened inflation. The country went from seeing over 20% monthly inflation rates to 4% in a year.
That allowed him to pursue his next objective — launching a “culture war,” by which he means a coordinated effort to push right-wing ideas across all levels of society. It was not enough to merely “administer [the state] correctly” — the battle had to be fought in the media and in higher education, and via the building of popular consensus around national aspirations. Only through these efforts could “the left” be defeated “once and for all.”
When Milei delivered the closing address in front of a Trumpian crowd in Buenos Aires, it seemed as if this cultural battle had been brewing for a long time and, in some respects, the right is currently winning it.
Agustin Laje, author of the bestseller “The Black Book of the New Left” and president of Fundacion Libre, a far-right think tank, has worked on building diplomatic bridges between like-minded leaders for a long time. He has spent much of his life “debunking,” in his words, leftist ideas and spreading far-right speech across Latin America and among Hispanics in the U.S.
Seven years ago, Laje said that honing and circulating powerful arguments among different audiences, generating attention and provoking curiosity would improve the right’s chances of winning the culture war. He wasn’t wrong.
He joined CPAC Buenos Aires remotely because he was giving talks in Mexico, which recently elected its first female president, the center-left Claudia Sheinbaum. His arguments, which were similar to many of the other speakers’, legitimized bodies like CPAC over multilateral institutions. He prepared a PowerPoint to demonstrate how a small elite had “imposed” the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development without democratic consultation, allegedly using buzzwords like “inclusion” and “sustainability” to justify global political control.
“Eighty-seven people shaped an agenda on behalf of all humanity,” he inveighed. Some in the audience gasped. (The 2030 Agenda is a global action plan adopted by the U.N. in 2015, consisting of “sustainable development goals” to tackle poverty and climate change, among others.)
Just over a decade ago, the political climate in Buenos Aires (and the region) was different. Argentina was a beacon of progressivism in a continent led by center-left presidents: Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Jose “Pepe” Mujica in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, among others. This “pink tide” (as the left turn among Latin American governments became known) was a time of ideological confidence. Feeling the wind at their backs, the region’s leaders spoke with conviction, vowing to reclaim their nations from the grip of neoliberalism and restore sovereignty and economic growth. These leaders also pushed their progressive agenda across multiple levels: state-run media, social security, cultural programs, tourism and alliances that would strengthen their demands in multilateral organizations.
The origin of this unified group of left-leaning Latin American leaders can be traced back to the 4th Summit of the Americas held in Argentina in 2005, where a free-trade proposal by the U.S. that would comprise nations across the Americas was widely rejected. At the time, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez famously declared “ALCA, ALCA, go to hell” (ALCA is the Spanish acronym for the Free Trade Area of the Americas). This summit, too, could have been considered an unconventional form of diplomacy at the time.
During those years, intellectuals and political figures from across the world — Noam Chomsky, members of the then-emergent Spanish political party Podemos and the Greek party Syriza — gathered in Argentina, recognizing it as a vital stage for the debates they believed would shape the global fight for social and economic justice.
Now, in the Hilton auditorium, the ideological pendulum had swung — but the fervor remained. As those progressive projects dispersed and leftist leaders lost elections or were embroiled in corruption scandals, the conservative opposition turned its attention to the cultural front and the war of ideas. These alternative forms of diplomacy — like the Buenos Aires CPAC — unite participants not based on their official status or rank but rather their ideological affinities. This kind of ideological diplomacy bypasses traditional channels and builds alliances beyond national interests — unlike the progressive Latin American forums of the 2010s, which occasionally had foreign guests but mostly revolved around regional issues.
“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement,” said Milei in CPAC Buenos Aires, quoting Lenin. “Building on the notion that organized evil can only be defeated by the organization of the good, we must strengthen the bonds between our countries.”
He proposed 10 political principles, which he framed as a battle plan. Chief among them was an unyielding commitment to truth, even when politically inconvenient, and a disdain for traditional politicians, whom he dismissed as belonging to self-serving elites. He urged his followers never to compromise their principles for votes, emphasizing that politics is a zero-sum game in which the left will occupy any ground not taken by the right.
Strength, he further argued, must be met with greater strength — attacks should be answered with escalation, and the fight for cultural dominance must be waged with the same intensity as economic and political struggles. Centrism, in his view, is little more than capitulation, and only a staunchly right-wing movement can dismantle socialism. But above all, he insisted, this is not just a political project — it is a civilizational crusade, a defense of Western values against those who, quoting (either wittingly or unwittingly) John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” would rather “reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
“Every success of wokeism has been imposed and it has fueled the rightful resentment of a society that has had enough — enough of the woke,” he concluded.
Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, an international relations scholar in Argentina, speaks of “the reactionary international” to describe a global network of conservative and far-right groups that defend traditional values, nationalism and the preservation of the status quo. Despite their differences, what unites them is that they project nostalgia into their politics, calling for a restoration of what they believe has been corrupted by progressive ideas.
“Although Milei, Trump [and Santiago] Abascal [the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party] … are not the same person,” he writes, “they are a part of the same reactionary family, sharing worldviews and proposals for change.” This family, according to Tokatlian, normalizes violence, questions the strength of institutions that once seemed solid and empowers the growth of leaders who “tune in with the disenchantment and the anger towards traditional politics — pushing, therefore, an agenda that seemed unfeasible.” In his words, both capitalism and progressivism are facing crisis as the reactionary international takes form.
Far from a programmatic approach, the expositions at CPAC Argentina abounded with claims that there is a prosperous and glorious past to be restored, with first-person accounts of leftists persecuting speakers and degrading their societies. Matt Schlapp even recounted a conversation with his daughters, in which he and his wife instructed them not to answer the door if federal authorities (under a Democratic administration) showed up at their house.
“Everything is narrative,” said Eduardo Bolsonaro, as he demanded the liberation of the Brazilians in jail for plotting a coup after his father, Jair, lost the 2022 election to Lula.
Stories are more powerful than arguments. In January 2025, after CPAC Buenos Aires and a few days after Trump’s inauguration, Milei gave one of his most controversial speeches yet. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, he escalated his rhetoric, declaring that “in its most extreme versions, gender ideology is essentially child abuse. They’re pedophiles.” He cited a case in Atlanta in which a gay couple were sentenced for abusing their children. He went on to denounce the inclusion of trans athletes in sports and the right of trans prisoners to be housed according to their gender identity.
In Argentina, pro-transgender laws have been in place for over a decade, with little resistance from the public. Building a political platform based on opposition to such legislation feels imported. Likewise, referencing a case in Atlanta as justification for an anti-LGBTQ+ stance does not resonate as a local issue. The broader conversation about “wokeism” is not inherently Argentine.
While much of the public discourse in the U.S. was being shaped by the rhetoric of so-called “identity politics,” something different was happening in Latin America: Several countries, including Argentina, were experiencing a wave of feminist and anti-imperialist activism that brought millions into the political discourse on rights and equality. These movements did not call for political freedom of specific constituencies but rather argued for broader structural economic and political changes. The term “woke” was not just unknown, but virtually nonexistent in the public conversation.
Natali Incaminato, a philosophy professor and writer who has researched the growth of the far-right and internet culture in Argentina, believes that using the term “woke” to replace what was not long ago labeled in Latin America as “progre” (from “progresista,” meaning “progressive”) helps build a lingua franca among global right-wing leaders and their societies. “It can name an enemy in Argentina, the United States, or Brazil; it can replace the domestic terms.”
But, although Incaminato acknowledges that opposition to wokeism in Argentina bridges conservative ideologies that were already circulating in the country, it is still seen as an effort to connect with Trumpism, as it is only used by some politicians and political leaders (like those attending CPAC).
Milei’s frequent use of antiwoke rhetoric aligns with the American public discourse rather than engaging with Argentina’s domestic struggles. This disconnect has prompted debate in Argentina. Milei’s comments in Davos ignited a massive protest spanning the political spectrum — including some of his congressional allies — demanding that the president not mistake his admiration for Trump for his duty to represent the Argentine people.
This is where cracks begin to show in the present forms of diplomacy. The broad-brushstroke approach — rallying against multilateralism, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, climate action and more — flattens the unique political contexts of each country. Unless right-wing politicians are Trump, it’s unlikely their voters back home will see these conferences as delivering a message that directly resonates with them.
However, CPAC does succeed in one crucial aspect, even in smaller versions like the one in Argentina: It projects power. It creates the sensation that those involved are marching toward a new world order. And much like the progressive governments that swept Latin America a decade ago, that feeling is undeniably electrifying. “We’re taking our countries back,” said Lara Trump in the conference, after describing her father-in-law’s mugshot as “the hottest in the whole world.”
Just outside the Buenos Aires conference venue, Daniel Parisini, known as “El Gordo Dan” (Fat Dan), an ultraconservative activist with a shady presence in the Milei government, told me that he believed “social media gave the common man a voice,” looking around himself. Not far from him, two young men — one from Mendoza, another province in Argentina, the other an Argentine living in the U.S. — took a selfie with their matching hats: One said “Make America Great Again,” the other “Make Argentina Great Again.”
I approached them quietly as I watched their photoshoot. They could not hide their glee. “My values were not well seen before [Milei arrived in office],” said one of them when I asked why he had traveled to Buenos Aires for CPAC. “They even made me hide myself because I was perceived as politically incorrect — but this cap makes me proud now.”
The excitement was unmistakable. I had seen it before in the packed halls of progressive forums of the early 2010s, where young activists believed they were building the future. The rhetoric had shifted completely, but the fervor — the same conviction that history was bending in their favor — remained untouched.
“I came because this is about a culture war that needs to be fought,” the young man told me. He glanced at a stock market graphic on his laptop, fixed his eyes on it and went on: “but mostly because it’s a lot of fun.”
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