Boarding the Wrong Train: Populist Fast Tracks

I boarded what I thought was the fastest train to a panel titled The End of Democracy: Latin American Perspectives on a Global Crisis. Only after admiring the calm Dutch polder rolling past did I realise the carriage was speeding in the opposite direction. A sudden leap onto the platform, an overpriced Uber, and a sheepish return later, the lapse struck me as a perfect allegory for democratic backsliding and the lure of populist quick fixes: the promise of arriving sooner masks the fact that you are on the wrong line entirely. The scenery looks reassuringly familiar, so no one pulls the alarm; yet the longer the mistake goes uncorrected, the steeper the price paid not just in euros, but in lost rights, silenced voices, and hollowed institutions. 

Democracy: rule by whom, for whom? 

Democracy is more than regular elections. It is the arrangement by which an entire people authorises public power and can call it to account. From a critical political-economy angle, those arrangements are never neutral; they tilt with class power, elite pressure and global market constraints. When Latin-American elites keep taxes low, profits high and media concentrated, insecurity and precarity invite "strong" outsiders who promise order. They run as rebels, then govern through the marriage of market orthodoxy and executive coercion. Three forces fuse in the current cycle. First, securitisation: recasting social concerns as threats to national survival, complete with emergency decrees, mega-prisons and mass deportations. Second, technocracy: treating poverty or climate collapse as technical glitches solvable by incentive tweaks and private contracts. Third, identity populism: nostalgia for racial or national hierarchies that turn migrants, feminists or environmental defenders into scapegoats. 

Mano dura, masculinity and the technocratic mask 

Is the new populism unavoidably male? The very question flirts with the essentialism it should disrupt. Gender is not a fixed substance but a choreography of acts that acquire authority through repetition and policing. Contemporary [mano dura] strongmen capitalise on performances coded as masculine: swagger, brusqueness, and the promise of decisive force because patriarchal structures reward those scripts. Bukele, who once posed with rainbow flags, now rehearses a hard-man role by railing against "gender ideology", while women in high office are shunted into hyper-feminised or caricatured frames that erode their legitimacy. Resisting mano dura, therefore, requires more than swapping male for female faces; it means unsettling the stage directions themselves, multiplying the ways leadership can be embodied, and refusing the binary cues on which punitive populism depends.

Technocratic posturing is the flip side of the same populist coin. Javier Milei casts himself as a spreadsheet saviour, promising fiscal order through sheer technical prowess. Inflation in pesos has fallen to roughly 4 per cent a month, yet in dollar terms, Argentina now suffers one of the world's worst price spirals: export goods cost twice what they did when he took office, sending shoppers and holiday-makers across the border and eroding local jobs. By taming the peso gauge and neglecting the dollar one, Milei triggered an IMF-driven devaluation that still leaves the currency far from equilibrium. He now relies on the very IMF loan he once denounced as a symbol of failure, and expertise without accountability is breeding fresh disenchantment. Should the recession deepen, decree-rule beckons: fuel for polarisation and institutional erosion. His security pact with Bukele signals an emerging axis of punitive governance that echoes Salvadoran tactics.

El Salvador shows the cost of that bargain. Homicides have dropped to about 2 per 100 000, but only after eighty-one thousand emergency arrests, roughly three hundred custodial deaths, and a legislature stripped of dissent. Bukele now proposes to warehouse US deportees and foreign detainees, outsourcing sovereignty to Washington in exchange for political cover.

Pulpits, markets, and the aesthetics of the vulgar 

Several hands shot up when the discussion turned to faith: how the audience wanted to know, does the Church fit into the resurgence of populism across Latin America? 

Religion is neither a halo nor a horn. In Latin American History, liberation theology supported land reform; Jesuits died for democratic ideals, and Pope Francis openly condemned genocide in Palestine. Yet scandals, especially around clerical abuse, severely eroded the Catholic Church's legitimacy in countries like Chile and Brazil. In that vacuum, a muscular evangelical right has risen, whose political arms now back extractive megaprojects. Faith communities are not monoliths; they are contested terrains. 

At the same time, today's populists have mastered the aesthetic of the vulgar. From TikTok tirades to meme-ready insults, style is never incidental. Crassness signals authenticity and forges a visceral bond between content creator and follower through shared transgression. Institutional critique becomes a personal affront to that bond, choking public deliberation before it begins. 

With Donald Trump back in the White House on 51 per cent of the vote, the hemisphere's gravitational field tilts further. In his first weeks, Trump reinstated Remain in Mexico, revoked climate protections, and imposed a federal two-gender policy. The exchange is clear: compliance for dollars, deportees, or silence. Leaders like Bukele and Milei have adjusted their nationalist scripts accordingly, trading sovereignty narratives for transactional alignment. 

Reading the signals in time 

Latinobarómetro 2024 tells us that 52 per cent of Latin Americans still prefer democracy—but trust in political parties has fallen to just 17 per cent. The track switches are clicking beneath our feet. If we wait until institutional confidence collapses entirely, returning to democratic ground rules will be far costlier: paid not just in pesos or dollars but in silenced voices and lives cut short. In an era of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, the signals may be harder to read. But that makes vigilance even more urgent. We must ask, at every turn, who benefits from each detour and refuses the patriarchal, technocratic, or securitarian disguises that make authoritarian drift look like progress.