From virtually the moment he and his band of bearded rebels rode into Havana in 1959 until his death from natural causes in 2016, the most iconic leader in Latin America was Fidel Castro. With his trademark military fatigues, slender Cohiba cigars, and marathon speeches vilifying Uncle Sam, Castro captured the imaginations of aspiring revolutionaries and millions of others around the world. Never content to merely govern Cuba, Castro worked tirelessly to export his ideas. His global network of allies and admirers grew over the decades to include leaders as diverse as Salvador Allende in Chile, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

El comandante would roll over in his grave if he learned that, today, the two Latin American figures who come closest to matching his global profile both hail from the ideological right. Javier Milei, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” president of Argentina who has wielded a chainsaw to symbolize his zeal for slashing the size of government, and Nayib Bukele, the bearded millennial leader of El Salvador, have built fervent followings at home and abroad. Instead of the ubiquitous Cuban revolutionary cry, ¡Hasta la victoria, siempre! (“Ever onward to victory!”), Milei’s libertarian catchphrase, ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! (“Long live freedom, damn it!”), is now showing up on T-shirts on some college campuses in the United States and being quoted by politicians as far away as Israel.

Like Castro in his day, both leaders are punching well above their countries’ weight in the global arena. Milei was the first head of state to meet U.S. President Donald Trump after his election in 2024, receiving a lavish welcome at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Trump has called Milei “my favorite president,” and in October he extended a $20 billion rescue package to Argentina—the largest such bailout by the United States for any country in 30 years. Milei’s success in cutting government bureaucracy and red tape, which helped bring inflation in Argentina from above 200 percent when he took office in 2023 to about 30 percent by late 2025, has been hailed as a model by the United Kingdom’s conservative opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and many others on the European right. It has also made him a guru of sorts for libertarian Silicon Valley titans such as Elon Musk, who wielded Milei’s chainsaw onstage at a conference of conservatives in the United States in February. Meanwhile, Bukele’s crackdown on gangs has made him a wildly popular figure across much of Latin America and beyond, even as he unapologetically casts aside concerns about due process and human rights. (Some 81 percent of Chileans in a 2024 poll gave Bukele a positive rating, higher than that of any other global leader and more than double that of their own president.) Bukele has over 11 million followers on TikTok, more than any other head of state except Trump.

The true revolutionary fervor in today’s Latin America, with leaders determined to transform not just their countries but the region itself, is primarily evident on the ideological right. With conservative leaders recently winning several elections and favored in others over the next year, Latin America seems primed for a once-in-a-generation shift that would fundamentally change how countries deal with organized crime, economic policy, their strategic relationships with the United States and China, and more. In 2025, the conservative president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, was reelected, while Milei’s party won an unexpectedly large victory in Argentina’s critical midterm legislative elections, adding even greater momentum to his agenda. Bolivia saw an end to almost 20 years of socialist rule with the election of Rodrigo Paz Pereira, a centrist reformer. Conservative presidential hopefuls are leading polls in Costa Rica and Peru, and are within striking distance in Brazil and Colombia, in elections due before the end of 2026.

Latin America is composed of some 20 countries with distinct histories and political dynamics, and the right may not ultimately prevail in every case. But there have been other moments in history when the region moved more or less in sync: the reactionary dictatorships that swept much of the region in the 1960s and 1970s following the Cuban Revolution, the great re-democratizing wave of the 1980s, the pro-market “Washington consensus” reforms of the 1990s, and the so-called pink tide that brought Chávez and other leftists to power in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, another such regional realignment appears to be taking shape, challenging some of the most basic assumptions the outside world makes about Latin America. The result would be a region that in the coming years pursues a more aggressive policy on drug trafficking and other crimes, is friendlier to domestic and foreign investment, worries less about climate change and deforestation, and is broadly aligned with the Trump administration on priorities such as security and migration and limiting China’s presence in the Western Hemisphere. Given the history of U.S. interventionism in Latin America, one might have expected the rise of a heavy-handed, nationalist, right-wing U.S. president to propel a left-wing resistance in the region. Instead, at least for now, the Latin American leaders benefiting most from Trump’s return are not the ones who denounce and defy him but the ones who admire, flatter, and even emulate him.

This rightward shift does not appear to be just another relatively minor cyclical or short-lived pendular swing in the region’s politics. A careful look at polling and other underlying trends suggests that conservative ideas and policy priorities do seem to be gaining ground in Latin America. A closely watched annual survey of more than 19,000 respondents in 18 countries by Latinobarómetro, a Chile-based regional poll, reported that in 2024, the degree to which Latin Americans identified as right-wing was at its highest level in more than two decades. The same poll showed Bukele as by far the most popular politician throughout the region, with an average rating of 7.7 on a ten-point scale; the least popular, also by a wide margin, was Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator of Venezuela, with a score of just 1.3.

Most of the reasons for the right’s ascendancy stem not from factors abroad but from changing realities within Latin America. At the top of the list is the public’s growing frustration with crime, which is hardly a new challenge for the region but has grown substantially worse in recent years. According to estimates by the United Nations, the amount of cocaine produced in Latin America has tripled over the last decade, providing the region’s gangs and cartels with unprecedented wealth and power and fueling drug-related violence. Latin America accounts for eight percent of the world’s population but about 30 percent of its homicides. In several countries holding elections over the next year, including Brazil and Peru, crime—an election issue that has traditionally strongly favored the right—appears in surveys as........

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