Behind it all is the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” economist, television pundit and lambchop sideburn-laden populist President Javier Milei, who took office at the end of 2023. Milei’s rapid rise was fueled in part by his relative outsider status in a moment of economic crisis caused by what Milei calls the failed political “caste.” Argentina is grappling with inflation rates of more than 200%, a 40% poverty rate, plummeting foreign currency reserves and massive sovereign debt.

Milei, who defeated his institutional political opponents in a run-off, cited the Hanukkah story of the Maccabees in his inauguration speech in December, describing the Jewish warriors’ successful revolt against the ruling class in the 2nd century B.C. as a “symbol of the victory of the weak over the powerful.” This was no coincidence. Alongside his transgressive public presence and radical policy decrees, Milei emphatically embraces Judaism.

Born and raised Catholic, like the majority of Argentines, Milei has in recent years studied the Torah with great intrigue. He claims that he is seriously considering converting to Orthodox Judaism, but says he would do this only after his term in office, given the strict lifestyle requirements of orthodoxy. And he has voiced full-throated support for Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

At his inauguration, Milei hosted conservative populist Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian prime minister, who is a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has drawn harsh critiques for his attempts to downplay the Hungarian role in the persecution of Jewish people during World War II and for his demonization of American-Hungarian philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish. Also at the inauguration and invited to light the Hanukkah menorah was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose dependence on Western powers to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion has made him a symbol of liberal internationalism — one that the isolationist populist right has grown to loathe. After the ceremony, Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, was seen confronting Orbán over the Hungarian prime minister’s obstruction of efforts to get European Union aid to Ukraine.

Shortly before his inauguration, Milei received blessings from the famed Kabbalistic rabbi David Hanania Pinto. After his inauguration, Milei flew to New York to visit the tomb of “the Rebbe,” as the influential Hasidic spiritual leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson who died in 1994, is known; his burial place was also famously visited before Election Day 2016 by Ivanka Trump, herself a convert. After the gravesite visit, Milei dined with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and Gerardo Werthein, a close personal friend of Clinton’s, who will soon become Argentina’s ambassador to the U.S. Werthein too is Jewish.

On the outside at least, Milei holds many contradictions. His embrace of a nationalist populist like Orbán suggests one set of priorities, while his kinship with Zelenskyy, a Jewish leader raising money globally for the war with Russia, suggests another. The same could be said of his visit to a religiously conservative spiritual site followed by lunch with a neoliberal Democrat who famously scandalized the White House by having an affair with an intern. Politically, religiously and stylistically, Milei is difficult to categorize.

Like other populists, his perceived authenticity is his biggest political asset. But who is the authentic Milei? Venezuelan journalist Moises Naim wrote in El País that there are two Mileis: One is the bespectacled libertarian economist who may actually break an economic gridlock for Argentina. The other is the tantric sex expert with an Austin Powers hairdo who famously hired a medium to speak with his deceased dog and dead people who told him he would win the presidency.

In a similar vein, there seem to be two Mileis with Judaism: One who has a sincere calling to the faith and all its intricate pluralisms, and one who dialogues with a global right that has used Israel as a symbol of conservative ethnonationalism while also engaging in antisemitic rhetorical tropes that have galvanized and won the support of disaffected, largely white Christian voters in both the U.S. and Europe.

Argentina itself is a place of contradictions in recent Jewish history. It has given safety to Jews fleeing persecution throughout the 20th century — they now compose about 0.5% of the population and represent Latin America’s largest Jewish community. But it also gave refuge to Nazis escaping war crimes tribunals after the Holocaust. A Spanish judiciary commission found that during Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, Jews were disproportionately targeted for torture and disappearance. 

Milei has downplayed the “dirty war” carried out by that anti-communist military regime, which investigators later estimated to have ordered the extrajudicial killings of more than 20,000 people. His vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has pushed what the Buenos Aires Times called a “denialist discourse” about the history of the dictatorship. Families of victims have expressed fear that whitewashing Argentina’s darkest chapter of the 20th century could pave the way for history to repeat itself. 

In more recent decades, Argentina has become the site of proxy attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions carried out by Iranian-aligned extremist groups. A 1992 suicide bombing on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people and a similar attack on a Jewish community center two years later killed 85. Decades later, investigations into the bombings were marred by allegations that sitting government officials, including the left-wing president at the time, Cristina de Kirchner, had orchestrated a cover-up and committed. Alberto Nisman, the federal prosecutor investigating these allegations, was found dead in his apartment in 2015, shortly before he was scheduled to present his findings.

And despite Milei’s embrace of Judaism, his own administration is not immune to antisemitic allegiances. His attorney general, Rodolfo Barra, was once forced to resign from a government job when it was discovered he had been part of neo-Nazi group Tacuara.

The Israel-Hamas war has of course ratcheted up tensions around these cases, and in Jewish and Arab communities across the country.

“For most people, his Judaism is another eccentricity,” says writer Tamara Tenenbaum, whose father was killed in the 1994 Jewish community center bombing. Tenenbaum was part of a diverse group of Argentine Jewish intellectuals and leaders who signed a letter, “Milei does not represent us,” noting how Milei had been embraced by right-wing political projects around the world that champion Israel while simultaneously leaning into antisemitic tropes — through the vilification of concepts like “globalism” or “cultural marxism”— and supporting other forms of racism and discrimination. All this comes against a backdrop of a rising evangelical population in Argentina that supports both Milei and Israel, but may resist more progressive visions held by some segments of the Jewish community. 

“I got a lot of antisemitic hate online from supporters of Milei,” Tenenbaum told me. “Your surname speaks for you,” one person wrote her. Another message read: “Of course you are a leftist whore with that name.”

Since taking office, Milei has announced pro-Israel policies, like declaring Hamas a terrorist organization, installing his personal rabbi, Axel Wahnish, as ambassador to Israel, and declaring intentions to move Argentina’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The moves have inspired what Buenos Aires-based rabbi Fabián Skolnik calls “two opposing sentiments” among Argentine Jews who support Milei. On the one hand, “the community feels pride and happiness to have a pro-Jewish, pro-Israel president. He participates in community activities, in Hanukkah, in Jewish life.” Yet on the other hand, having a president visibly associated with Judaism inspires worry. “If things don’t go well and issues start to emerge, a lot of folks in the Jewish community are afraid that will awaken antisemitism.”

Not simply in style or words, Milei has networked himself with a posse of populist right-wing politicians worldwide, many members of which have embraced Israel, sometimes in spite of their own antisemitic leanings, in a fight against Islamic extremism or the fabled brand of communism they say is threatening to traditional family values. Right-wing populist leaders who celebrated Milei’s victory have in recent years also specifically embraced Netanyahu, Israel and “Judeo-Christian” conservative values — be they former U.S. President Donald Trump or former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who also proposed moving the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem after the U.S. did as much in 2018.

Milei appears to be interested in aligning himself with other figures who may support his vision for austerity. “He happens to be in the same box as nationalist populist figures,” said Juan Soto, who has organized right-wing leaders including Milei in his work with the Disenso Foundation, a think-tank arm of Spain’s far right Vox Party. To wit, Milei signed onto the 2020 Carta de Madrid, a brief manifesto penned by the Disenso Foundation that denounced the supposedly encroaching specter of communism in Spain, Latin America and the United States.

But, Soto told me, “economic protectionism is where the New Right can be divided.” He described Milei as an outlier, in that he is “a free marketeer, a classical liberal, who needs international help.” In this sense too, Milei embodies contradictions. He is a libertarian who wants to dollarize the Argentine economy, who will also deeply rely on the International Monetary Fund — which Argentina owes $32 billion — to course correct his country’s economy. This is a far cry from other populist parties who embrace economic nationalism or alternative transnational cooperation with some of the U.S.’s rivals, such as BRICS — which Milei has refused to join — whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India and China. 

Milei may align with Vox’s Carta de Madrid, but he doesn’t align with Old World conservatism that sometimes veers into Putin fetishism, as in the case of Hungary’s Orbán. In this sense, we have to understand Milei’s as a distinctly New World brand. He welcomes Yankee internationalism and displays a unique mash-up of embracing libertine social preferences mixed with conservative religious guidance. He has supporters with antisemitic leanings, but he himself loves Judaism. Milei may be more like Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador with Palestinian ancestry, who staunchly supports Israel, decries Hamas and has taken extreme measures to enact change in El Salvador — much akin to Milei’s campaign spirit of waving a chainsaw as a symbol of drastic change coming. In a battle to eradicate the country’s drug cartels, Bukele has taken a “state of exception” to extremes, overseeing the arrests of nearly 60,000 people alongside enforced disappearances, torture of detainees and an overall dissolution of due process. These measures have drastically reduced El Salvador’s once record-high homicide rate, but at a tremendous cost to its democracy and to the tens of thousands affected by Bukele’s scorched-earth approach.

Perhaps part of Milei’s interest in aligning with traditionalist or religious factions of the global right on issues like abortion, which he firmly opposes, is to distinguish himself from “social-marxist” opponents and civil rights detractors. “If you have an important figure in the global right like Milei who is so strongly interested in Judaism, it is an important building block in the ‘Judeo-Christian’ coalition,” says Rabbi Slomo Koves, a leader of the Hungarian Chabad, a highly networked sect of Judaism known for encouraging more religious observance among Jews. The global right’s embrace of the “Judeo” within the “Judeo-Christian” coalition could mitigate antisemitism within some rank-and-file. Or it could just help to cover it up. 

While holding all of these contradictions on the global stage and at home, Milei is already bringing shock therapy to Argentina’s bedraggled economy. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year – the nationalist’s symbol of greedy globalists –  Milei addressed business leaders saying they were “social benefactors” and that free markets, not socialism, would save Argentina. He is a populist stradling the “globalist” and the “nationalist” divide. He is a potential Jewish convert navigating support for two different Jewish leaders, supporting two very different wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. At home, he is alternately donning his economist glasses and his chainsaw. How will all this impact Argentina’s economy, Jewish population and national fabric? We’ll soon find out.

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Enter CPAC México.

Held on November 18 and 19 at a Westin Hotel in Santa Fe, a upscale skyscraper-studded neighborhood in Mexico City, the gathering of cultural warriors, ideological true-believers, Catholic nationalists and cross-border election-deniers drew attention to imported right-wing influencers, politicians and microcelebrities from the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Many had gone on the road with CPAC before, in Brazil, Israel and Hungary. Panels about “bioconservatism vs. transhumanism” were held alongside more traditional speeches against communism. 

The speaker line-up included: 

• Former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon, who beamed into CPAC México via video link from Arizona where he was contesting that state’s midterm election. He discussed the “globalist threat” to national sovereignty. 

• American anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, who falsely suggested López Obrador stole the Mexican presidential election in 2018, an allegation surprising even to the Mexicans in the audience. 

• Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the recently defeated Brazilian president, who pushed his way through fans and the press on his way to give a speech about the burgeoning global conservative movement. 

• Argentinian presidential candidate Javier Milei, with a Beatles haircut and iconic lamb chops, who unspooled an economic vision of “anarcho-capitalist” libertarianism.

• Defeated conservative presidential candidate José Antonio Kast of Chile who has family ties to the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet and is the son of a Nazi Party member.  

• President of the Mexican Republicans, Juan Iván Peña Neder, who had spent two years in a maximum security Matamoros prison on gang rape charges — which he contests. 

At the beginning of the conference, a group of anti-fascist protesters showed up at the hotel adorned in Che Guevara shirts waving red hammer and sickle flags, while jumping up and down. They looked like activists in communist cosplay. Matt Schlapp, the American chair of CPAC, went outside to greet them on video, which he shared on Twitter, dubbing it “CPAC Derangement Syndrome,” by which he meant a stalkerish obsession with protesting conservatives.  

CPAC México packed the carnivalesque energy of the much larger CPAC event held each year in the U.S. minus the kitschy Americana costumes and day drinking. There was a Catholic presence. Nuns in habits applauded speeches warning about the perils of youth transgender surgery. The international press in Mexico City covered CPAC México, but it was a small event: roughly 700 attendees and 75 speakers. There were 140 registered journalists. 

At first, one person was conspicuously missing. 

Before the last hour of CPAC México, the only sign of Donald Trump was the tricolor “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” hats among attendees. He was not on the agenda. That changed when Trump appeared in a surprise pre-recorded video message, congratulating the CPAC México organizer Eduardo Verástegui on his leadership in pulling off the inaugural event. 

The crowd lavished applause on Verástegui. A woman began to shout, “Eduardo Presidente!” 

A handsome former telenovela star and boy band singer, more recently Verástegui has placed his faith center-stage, reciting the rosary online during the pandemic and campaigning against abortion and gay marriage. The Catholic social organization he founded in 2019, Movimiento Viva México, co-sponsored CPAC México, and he has been called a future Mexican Donald Trump and a potentially potent opposition leader in Mexico.

Verástegui recently raised his profile in the U.S. He announced CPAC México at the CPAC held in Texas. Earlier this year he also stumped for losing Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in Arizona, an intensely popular figure among Trump supporters. 

One week after CPAC México, the other side will show up. The Summit of the Pacific Alliance, attended by populist progressive leaders who have come to power in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Chile will convene in Oaxaca. The nearly coinciding conferences pose something of a stand-off: can CPAC conservatives offer el pueblo, the people, a reason for voters to turn away from the ascendant Mexican left? 

As a scholar of conservative populist influencers, I have studied their effective tactics of garnering attention — and therefore political power — through networked storytelling, media stunts and tabloid rhetoric. Controversy is a strategy. Conservative spaces are no stranger to showmanship and celebrity, to tabloid, film and television stars, Trump being the most notable recent example. A product of the American Conservative Union, CPAC has a long history of uniting media spectacle with activism and ideas as a means of reconstituting the Right through moments of struggle. The inaugural CPAC in 1974 was headlined by Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, and set the stage for the “New Right” ascendancy that lifted the Republican party to national power after the Watergate scandal. 

CPAC México takes a page from this U.S. conservative playbook.

As in the American CPAC, the CPAC México speakers were accustomed to tabloid attention, adversarial relationships with the press and contentious political histories. Verástegui was a frequent tabloid target, claiming he had a romantic relationship with Ricky Martin before a subsequent religious turn towards celibacy. 

CPAC in the U.S. has traditionally been a tryout for future leadership and its Mexican iteration was no exception. A “Young Conservatives” panel featured speeches by millennial Mexicans, many involved in the anti-abortion movement. But the biggest expectations for future leadership rested on Verástegui and Karina Yapor, a photogenic Emmy award winning host at Voz Media who interviewed all the speakers in her booth on the micro-sized CPAC México “radio row.” 

Yapor is familiar with the tabloid gaze. She had written a heart wrenching memoir of her experience being sex trafficked as a child in the “star academy” of pop singers Sergio Andrade and Gloria Trevi. It put her on the radar of countless international tabloids.

Sex trafficking is a significant Mexican political issue. Verástegui showed a trailer of his newly produced action thriller “Sound of Freedom,” based on the anti-sex trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad. Its leader, Tim Ballard, was a speaker at CPAC México. “Storytellers are the heroes, always,” Ballard said, explaining how abolitionists defeated American slavery through story and Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad provided inspiration. He explained that Verástegui had reached out to him several years ago after seeing a CBS news clip of one of their videotaped operations in Colombia. Now they do films together. 

Mexico has the third highest national rate of child trafficking. But narratives of elites trafficking children are also central to QAnon conspiracies. “QAnon did a great disservice to this cause,” Ballard bemoaned, “I wouldn't be surprised, frankly, if traffickers are behind it. Because if you take something true that needs attention and you fill it with crap, you make it unbelievable.” 

Displays of piety were everywhere at CPAC México: tables selling religious pendants, nuns hosting 8am mass, cheers of “Viva Cristo Rey! Viva Virgin Guadalupe! Y Viva México!” Conservative American political operative and internet performer Jack Posobiec, known for a livestream “investigating” a child sex trafficking rumor, rallied a standing ovation with a cry of “Archangel Michael, Adi-yame!” ostensibly mispronouncing the Spanish for “help me.”  

López Obrador, Mexico’s left-wing president, has instituted policies that have alarmed liberals along with conservatives. He has invoked the specter of government militarization by, among other decisions, slashing police budgets in favor of enabling the military to fight narcotraffickers. He has botched state-owned transport and energy infrastructure projects, and he has proposed overhauling the National Electoral Institute, which critics claim would favor López Obrador and his party. The latter move brought tens of thousands of protestors into the capital’s streets. 

“There are two axes that control Mexico’s political battle: the one pro-López Obrador and the one against López Obrador,” Peña Neder, president of the Mexican Republicans, said. “And there’s a third axis in the conservative right that is still too far away from building any power.” 

In recent years under the leadership of Matt and Mercedes Schlapp, CPAC has developed a roadshow of conservative political microcelebrities trying to bring together a global right wing in Hungary, Brazil, Australia, Israel and now Mexico — to varying degrees of success.   

In his keynote address Eduardo Bolsonaro said: “This isn’t an ideology; this is a movement.” This suggests that policy alone was not enough to win an election. CPAC México is part of a larger strategy to build a recognizable and insurgent right-wing movement in Mexico allied with similar parties globally. Verástegui’s building of Movimiento Viva México is part of creating a brand ambassador for a fractured right. One organizer of the conference, Renee Bolio, noted that “center-right parties or candidates are very lukewarm.” To confront this, they mobilize social service organizations, particularly faith-based ones, for policy change around issues like abortion. 

For instance, many speakers including Verástegui, Bolsonaro and Schlapp were signatories of the Madrid Charter — a document drafted by the Disenso Foundation, a think tank associated with Spain’s populist, right-wing Vox party — that seeks to create a conservative world for “700 million people” in the “Iberosphere,” or countries with Spanish and Portuguese colonial heritage. It calls out “totalitarian regimes inspired by communism, supported by drug trafficking” and Cuba’s influence over them.

The Charter affirmed basic democratic values of rule of law, separation of powers, pluralism and human rights. But the far-right Vox party has often faced criticism for evoking symbols and slogans from Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator, and for opposing historical memory laws that would exhume unmarked graves currently in the Valley of the Fallen and give victims of his regime a proper burial. When Mexico’s conservative National Action Party signed the declaration, they were met with backlash for associating with Vox. Their backtracking caused some Mexican conservatives to feel abandoned. As Verástegui said in his opening speech, “The right, the true right, has been orphaned.”  

And Mexican conservatives feel they face more headwinds still. Bolio remarked on the lack of a strong right-wing media in Mexico, aside from a few influencers or religious outlets, which meant organizers had a hard time fundraising to put on the conference. But Bolio was optimistic: “Since yesterday, we have received calls saying ‘Wow we love what you are doing.’ It’s not hundreds, but maybe five or six good calls.” 

“The Mexican Right needs to leave the elite so it can reach the pueblo, the people,” Pedro Cobo, a director of research at the Mexican Republican Party, said.

“It’s hard to care about transhumanism when someone is being beheaded in your town,” Miguel Del Valle, 27, said. An enthusiastic conservative, Del Valle is a financial analyst who came to hear Steve Bannon and the losing candidate for French prime minister, Eric Zemmour, who both addressed the crowd via video.   

The CPAC roadshow may not get conservatives closer to the pueblo in Mexico but it can garner attention from the media, donors and bastions of Mexican conservative power. Whether Verástegui will be Mexico’s Trump remains to be seen. 

At the end of the conference, Verástegui greeted the crowd to the 1980s rock anthem “Eye of the Tiger” while adjusting the iPad that held his prepared speech. Despite being a seasoned actor, Verástegui opted not to memorize his speech or deliver off-the-cuff remarks like Eduardo Bolsonaro had the night before. He held onto the podium and spoke methodically as red, white and blue lights — not the Mexican national colors of green, white and red — shimmered across the ceiling. 

Reporting assistance by Vita Dadoo

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