ANALYSIS: US ‘Woke’ Agenda Flops in Latin America

A protester wears a T-shirt with a portrait of Argentinian communist leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara during a protest in front of the Palais de Justice of Amiens on Oct. 19, 2016. Francois Nascimben/AFP/Getty Images

News Analysis

Pockets of far-left activists who’ve taken up the mantle of U.S. “woke” ideology have popped up in Latin America like political whack-a-moles. Yet their rallying cry has fallen on mostly deaf ears, despite a new wave of leftist leaders in the region.

Because of the woke movement’s trademark rigid views on divisive social issues such as gender identity, new feminism, wealth distribution, and defunding the police, the activists’ battle cry has been mostly ignored or voted down.

Meanwhile, anti-woke movements are springing up faster than weeds in their wake.

Progressive ideals have failed to find solid footing even among leftists in countries with a favorable climate for their causes, such as the highly Westernized cultures of Chile and Argentina, both of which have socialist presidents.

A feminist activist uses a slingshot during a protest against gender violence and patriarchy in Santiago, Chile, on Nov. 29, 2019. Javier Torres/AFP via Getty Images

The woke activists in Latin American cities aren’t hard to spot. They leave behind calling cards such as images of the nefarious revolutionary Che Guevara dressed in drag against a rainbow backdrop.

Broken statues in city squares scribbled with anarchy symbols and Marxist slogans shouted alongside the sound of improvised projectile weapons hurled at police are among their signature moves.

It has all the vigor, marketing, and philosophical alignment of its sister movement in the United States.

Yet, woke philosophy in Latin America has been met with increasing disinterest and resistance at the civilian level. The new pink tide leaders in the region have also ignored it for the most part.

So why is the North American woke movement catching fire while its southern sister can’t seem to ignite?

Analysts and residents say cultural roots, combined with the realities of governance in developing economies, are something no amount of ideology can change.

Rooted in Family

“Latin America understands ‘woke’ a little bit different than we do,” Evan Ellis, a Latin America research professor for the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, told The Epoch Times.

Ellis said that a “cultural battle” is happening in the region amid mounting economic and political stress. These elements have turned many away from the more extreme left-wing ideas.

He said that beyond commonalities on issues such as the environment and social justice, U.S. woke culture has little in common with its Latin American counterpart.

That’s because, ironically, woke ideology requires economic and educational privilege to flourish.

“At one level, I think extreme social progressivism is a luxury of societies with high levels of development,” Ellis said.

Poverty in Argentina has reached 40 percent, and homeless camps, such as in this photo from Aug. 5, 2022, are a common sight in Buenos Aires. Autumn Spredemann/The Epoch Times

In a region where more than 30 percent of the population lives in poverty, campaigns for gender-neutral pronouns and rosy shades of communist rhetoric aren’t attractive to those just struggling to survive.

Hence, woke activism tends to appear in the countries with the largest, most affluent economies.

But then there is the past and present suffering of millions under socialist dictators, which woke activists tend to romanticize or ignore entirely.

“Ask anyone who works in Argentina, or better, a Venezuelan, how well left ideas have worked out,” Alvaro Gomez told The Epoch Times.

Gomez is a recently retired taxi driver and longtime Buenos Aires resident who has watched the more extreme aspects of U.S. woke culture circulate in his hometown.

He said the movement was branded the “new left” but that it has few things in common with the views of many left-wing voters.

Gomez called concepts such as radical feminism and gender ideology a “ridiculous distraction” from the real challenges his country faces.

‘Real Problems’

“Our economy is in ruins; our government is a mess. We have real problems to deal with,” he said. “The majority of leftists here just want more subsidies, and the right wants to pay less taxes. But everyone has strong roots in the home, in family.”

That cuts to the core of why woke philosophy hasn’t grown deeper roots in the region. Catholics colonized most of Latin America, and today, Christianity remains a prevailing force and emphasizes the importance of traditional family units.

Ellis said colonial-era conservatism has been replaced by a “new type of conservatism” and that both have strong Christian roots.

“Latin America continues to be very religious and very traditionalist. Even leftists fall under social conservatism,” regional analyst and celebrated author Dr. Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat told The Epoch Times.

Besides undermining the traditional concept of family, U.S. woke ideology ignores important lessons from the region’s history.

Wearing a Blindfold

In the United States, criticizing the government isn’t normally something that gets a person murdered in broad daylight. But for years in many Latin American countries, it was.

In Argentina, a forensic investigation took place in 2020 to identify the bodies of 600 political dissidents who were forcibly “disappeared” during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s.

Chile has a similar gruesome mass grave in Santiago known as Patio 29, which contains the remains of antigovernment activists executed by a military dictator.

Both dictatorships arrived on the heels of sharp economic decline at the hands of socialist leadership. It left a permanent stamp in people’s memories of what it means to follow socialist ideals blindly.

Thousands of protesters and political dissenters have been arrested, executed, or forcibly exiled by Cuba’s communist regime since the 1960s. Their persecution at the hands of the entrenched regime is ongoing.

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega (R) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) attend a welcome ceremony at an airport in Managua, Nicaragua, on July 11, 2014. Alexei Nikolsky, Presidential Press Service/AP Photo

Leftist presidents in the modern era haven’t fared any better. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro face a growing list of accusations of human rights abuses.

And in the middle of this is Latin America’s alleged “new left” rebranded U.S. woke subculture that clings to brutal revolutionaries such as Guevara while lamenting oppression but also ignores entire chapters of the region’s history.

“People are like, ‘Yeah, we’ve heard these ideas before,’” Ellis said.

In Argentina, one of the historical blindfolds takes the shape of Guevara as the titular figure of the LGBT movement for a more inclusive gender identity.

This stands in sharp contrast to the dictator’s well-documented legacy of hating homosexuals and targeting them for imprisonment and execution.

Boronat, the co-founder of the Cuban Democratic Directorate, said he finds this idolization of Guevara laughable.

A supporter of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, portraying guerrilla leader Ernesto Che Guevara, waits for the results of the legislative election, in Caracas, on Dec. 7, 2015. Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images

“Guevara and Fidel Castro set in motion a systematic program of persecution, harassment, and imprisonment of homosexuals. This kind of program had never taken place in Cuban history. This kind of repression was ongoing in Cuba until very, very recently,” he said.

In Chile, it became clear that woke activists were out of touch with the realities of governance in September 2022 after the country resoundingly voted down a far-left draft for the nation’s new constitution.

Critics called the draft “ridiculously broad” and a “confusing mess” that was heavy-handed on social issues and proposed drastic economic changes.

An overwhelming 62 percent voted against the constitutional referendum, which aimed to replace the one established during the era of military dictator Augusto Pinochet.

It was a surprising outcome because nearly 80 percent of Chileans voted in favor of replacing the Pinochet constitution in an October 2020 referendum.

Regardless, a clear message emerged: Drastic social reform isn’t worth losing economic stability.

In the wake of the failed leftist reform, Chile’s right-wing parties secured a majority of seats to draft a new constitution on May 7, creating what the Chilean media called an “earthquake” in the country’s politics.