Reinventing Mexican Conservatism

The Mexican edition of the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference, held late last month in Mexico City, brought Ronald Reagan back from the dead. After the audience sang the Mexican national anthem and a Trump favorite, Christopher Macchio, belted out “Ave Maria,” sparkler cannons shot over the stage, and a deepfake Reagan appeared on the conference hall’s screen. The late president addressed attendees in fluent Mexican Spanish, welcoming these freedom fighters before introducing fellow actor-turned-politician Eduardo Verástegui as his friend. Verástegui, the telegenic fifty-year-old founder of far-right organization Movimiento Viva México, bounded onstage to the audience’s chants of “Presidente!” then turned to thank Reagan’s likeness. “Never stop fighting for the rights of the unborn,” the animation admonished before vanishing.

The second annual event, hosted by Movimiento Viva México, brought together far-right figures and their adherents from the United States, Latin America, and Europe. About 1,500 sympathizers to the cause spent at least the equivalent of three weeks of minimum-wage earnings—4,500 pesos, or about $224 (more if they paid for a VIP ticket)—to listen to a slate of political figures lay out their vision for the continued rise of the far right in Latin America. To the audience’s chagrin, Argentine president Javier Milei cancelled his appearance just a few days before the event, but conference-goers were able to bask in the physical and virtual gazes of several other leading lights of global conservatism. Santiago Abascal, Giorgia Meloni, and Donald Trump all sent video greetings, and a former Trump official shared diplomatic secrets about a regime-change attempt in Venezuela.

The event also served to drum up support for Viva México’s plans to consolidate a new far-right political party. Conservatism in Mexico traditionally finds a home in the National Action Party (PAN), the main opposition during almost a century of one-party rule by the corporatist Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI). Power changed hands for the first time in seven decades in 2000, with the election of PAN candidate Vicente Fox. His successor, Felipe Calderón, best known for starting the drug war that sent the country into a bloody spiral, also came from the PAN. In 2012, the PRI returned to power with Enrique Peña Nieto, whose tenure was marked by a series of privatization reforms and corruption scandals. The 2018 elections resulted in the historic victory of Andres Manuel López Obrador, long the face of the country’s electoral left and the founder of the progressive Morena party.

For this June’s elections, the PAN and the PRI set aside their historic rivalry to run candidate Xochitl Gálvez, a senator and tech entrepreneur whose campaign focused less on her neoliberal, center-right platform than on disparaging Morena. Unfortunately for the opposition coalition, Morena turned out to be immensely popular: voters elected their candidate Claudia Sheinbaum as the next president of Mexico by a thirty-point margin.

Among those disappointed with the 2024 presidential candidates was Carlos Leal, a career politician from the northern state of Nuevo León who was expelled from Morena in 2024 for homophobic tweets. (Leal was elected by the evangelical Christian Social Encounter Party, which, along with several other small parties, is part of Morena’s electoral coalition; he says that allying with left-wing parties is a “mistake [he] won’t repeat.”) Now he is part of the nascent Viva México Movement, which seeks to challenge the PAN as the standard bearer of Mexican conservatism. Leal refrained from voting for president in June. For mayor of San Nicolas de los Garza, he selected the option offered by the PAN, but he refused to support Xochitl Gálvez for president. The opposition frontrunner began her political life in a Trotskyist organization, and her views on abortion and gay marriage lean too liberal for Leal. “Xochitl Gálvez is a leftist,” he told reporters at CPAC. “In Mexico, we don’t have a representative for our values of life, family, and fundamental liberties. The one who supposedly has to represent us is the PAN, but it’s lost its way.” The PAN’s alliance with the PRI, he estimated, laid bare the right’s true interest: power, not conservative values. For president, Leal wrote in Verástegui, who had failed to collect the million signatures required to run as an independent candidate.

Verástegui, an actor and producer, is best known for producing the film Sound of Freedom. A sensation among conservative Christians since its release in the summer of 2023, the movie is a heavily fictionalized adaptation of the life of Timothy Ballard, who was ousted from the anti-sex trafficking organization he founded for sexual misconduct. In the film, Ballard hunts down a child sex trafficking ring and finds it run by the FARC, the leftist Colombian guerrilla group. Verástegui turned the film’s themes into a political platform, leveraging concern for the welfare of children—including the unborn—as a vehicle for anticommunism. After failing to run as an independent, he announced plans to found a new party to sponsor his 2030 presidential bid.

Reagan wasn’t the only figure to come back from the dead to pump up the crowd at CPAC Mexico. In the absence of living Mexican politicians eager to join the movement, the conference’s production team also summoned up a cast of ghosts from Mexican history. Hernán Cortés galloped across the screen to a robotic voiceover invoking the legacy of the Spanish colonizers who, in his ventriloquized words, “protected the rights of all and promoted the salvation of souls.” Catholic thinker Anacleto González Flores, who was executed in 1927 after participating in the anti-secularist Cristero Rebellion, gave attendees a pep talk from beyond the veil.

But even in the absence of these apparitions, much of the event felt like time travel. Echoes of Cold War rhetoric pervaded the conference’s thirteen hours of speeches. Matt and Mercedes Schlapp, director and advisor, respectively, of U.S. CPAC, took to the stage to denounce the “virus of Marxism in the bloodstream of America” (as well as the “wide-open, unregulated border”). Colombian politician Maria Fernanda Cabal warned the crowd that communism “follows a road map from Cuba through Latin America.” Hungarian politician Vajk Farkas remixed The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting the west, and it’s more dangerous than its grandparents.”

Amid familiar stabs at Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, this brand of Latin American anticommunism came with an added dose of anti-trans, anti-feminist sentiment. Calling in over video, French politician Thibaud Monnier bemoaned the recent Paris Olympics opening ceremony’s “LGBT parody of the Last Supper.” Farkas lamented “cancel culture” coming after anyone “defending women’s sports,” while Chilean analyst Axel Kaiser referred to Imane Khelif as the “male boxer” who “beat up lots of women,” before warning the crowd of a “new era of darkness brought on by the most perverted ideas the human mind can create.”

Brazilian Sara Huff, née Winter, was the star of a segment dedicated to women denouncing the false promises of feminism. The thirty-two-year-old, who sported the only visible tattoos on the conference stage, narrated her life story to a rapt audience: after finding herself homeless and pushed into sex work as a teenager, she founded the Brazil chapter of the Ukrainian feminist organization Femen, even traveling to Ukraine for a feminist boot camp. After a misoprostol abortion caused her to hemorrhage, her neighbors, a “white Catholic man” and his wife “who prays the rosary,” drove her to the hospital. The pro-life movement, she said, went on to pay her rent for a year and support her studies. She left behind her feminist activism to advocate for women to “follow their natural destiny” of motherhood and servitude rather than pursuing careers. “It’s amazing what grace can do,” murmured a woman next to me as Huff recounted her conversion.

Later, I asked Huff what she proposes for Latin American women who face, as she once did, economic conditions that preclude a tradwife vocation. After insisting that feminism is an export from the North that “confuses” Latin American women, she offered, in the way of social policy, a piece of advice: “Stop having sex with idiots, and find a good man,” she answered. “Be more intelligent.”

Amid the specters of history and portentous references to dark, child-perverting forces, the pragmatists of the day were the political strategists behind the Movimiento Viva México. In a panel titled “The Partycracy in Mexico,” pro-business lobbyist Ferdinard Recio, political communication consultant Christian Camacho, and Carlos Leal detailed their strategy for building a new conservative base. They painted a picture of a grassroots right-populist party, one that would combine Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s approach to security with anti-poverty initiatives built on alliances with civil society organizations. To triumph in 2030, they reasoned, they need to win over the voters who had given Sheinbaum such a commanding victory in the recent elections.

Recio, former director of the Mexican employers’ association COPARMEX, argued that Morena owes its popularity to its antiestablishment discourse. “Claudia didn’t win, the anti-politician discourse won,” he told reporters. “The winner was everyone who’s disappointed with democracy and who found a different option to what has been a disaster for years . . . and they’ve been a disaster for the simple reason that they have never been representative of society.” In a political landscape where politicians often switch between ostensibly opposing parties, a practice known in Mexico as “grasshoppering,” Viva México is not interested in career politicians looking for their latest check. Instead, the organization plans to seek 2030 candidates who’ve never held public office.

The strategists are confident that the party can use religion to pull voters to the right. They identify their potential base as poor Catholics who are concerned about security and put off by Morena’s progressive stances on homosexuality, abortion, and gender. Per Leal’s diagnosis, the country’s high poverty rates give the left an unfair advantage. “That poverty has been taken advantage of by the left parties to work on social issues, with social welfare, because most Mexicans, I assure you, are conservatives,” he told reporters. He pointed out that about 85 percent of Mexicans are Christian, between evangelicals and Catholics. “I think that that part of society shares our ideas of defending life, the family, and being against abortion. But they have other priorities: yes, I’m against abortion, but I need my Bienestar [welfare program] card because that’s where I get my economic support, which unfortunately the current opposition has pushed aside.”

Antiabortion and antigay marriage views are a nonnegotiable for potential party members, but Leal affirms that Viva México will be “a little more social” than other right-wing parties. “We are looking to put forth a right that works with society, that isn’t an elitist right,” he explained.

Also on hand to lay out the movement’s path to victory was Argentine political analyst Agustín Laje. A prominent supporter of Javier Milei, Laje took the stage to share lessons from Argentina for building right-wing movements from the ground up. An effective far-right party, he theorized, should include thinkers from three distinct currents: non-globalist libertarians; conservatives who “don’t confuse politics with religion,” that is, who set aside interdenominational disagreements to unite over political concerns; and “antistate sovereigntists.” Only with those three currents, he insisted, can the right confront “statism, globalism, and wokeism.” Echoing the strategy of the Milei campaign, he urged the audience to become “hyperactive” on social media to fight the culture war. “Download Twitter,” he exhorted them. “You can send tweets from your bathroom. Tweets are gunshots.”

When it came to discussions of regional geopolitics, stolen elections were the order of the day. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president’s son, closed out the conference with a presentation detailing the judicial system’s interference in the 2022 election that his father lost. One speaker after another called for more aggressive U.S. intervention in Venezuela before Richard Grenell, the former Trump intelligence secretary, offered up a juicy bit of gossip: he confirmed the rumors of a secret deal offered to Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in 2020. Grenell had never publicly revealed the details of the meeting before, but Mercedes Schlapp coaxed them out of him. “You had a secret meeting with Jorge Rodríguez. You haven’t talked about it. Is there anything you want to say here? No is not an answer,” she pressed. He began to respond, then paused mid-story: “I’m going to get in all sorts of trouble,” he mused before going on anyway.

In September of 2020, Grenell recounted, he flew to Mexico City—in secret, but Reuters and the New York Times found out—to meet with high-ranking Maduro official Jorge Rodríguez. He offered to evacuate Maduro, his family, and his advisers from Venezuela in exchange for the United States dropping all charges against the president. (Just months before, Trump’s Justice Department announced “narco-terrorism” charges against Maduro and several Venezuelan officials for allegedly conspiring with the FARC to “flood the United States with cocaine.”) The deal, of course, didn’t go through, which Grenell blamed on poor timing: he guessed that Maduro preferred to wait for Biden to win the U.S. election.

After spilling the story, Grenell urged the audience to double down on their own political commitments. He warned the conference-goers that left-wing Mexico was on its way to becoming Venezuela if they didn’t act. “Wake up every day, and do something to save your country,” he exhorted. But they wouldn’t have to do it alone. “When Donald Trump wins,” he said, “the Western Hemisphere is going to feel the wave.”