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.

Due to the woke movement’s trademark rigid views on divisive social issues like 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 other leftists in countries with a favorable climate for their causes, like the highly Westernized cultures of Chile and Argentina. Both of which have socialist presidents.

The woke activists in Latin American cities aren’t hard to spot. They leave behind calling cards like 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.

“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 says 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 says beyond mirroring the United States on issues like 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.

In a region where more than 30 percent of the entire population lives in poverty, campaigns for gender-neutral pronouns and rosy shades of communist rhetoric are hard passes for those just struggling to survive.

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

But then there are the millions who’ve either suffered or still suffer 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 long-time 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 has few things in common with many left-wing voters.

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

“Our economy is in ruins; our government is a mess. We have real problems to deal with,” he said, adding, “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.”

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

Ellis says colonial-era conservatism has been replaced by a “new type of conservatism,” both of which 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 Gutierrez-Boronat told The Epoch Times.

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

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

In Argentina, a forensic investigation of ghastly proportions 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 anti-government activists executed during its own rule 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 on the memories of families who remember 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.

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 like Guevara while crying oppression but, at the same time, 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 both hating and targeting homosexuals for imprisonment and execution.

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

“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,” Boronat said.

In Chile, it became clear 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 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 since 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 the price of economic stability.

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