On October 25, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term as president of Brazil, defeating Flávio Bolsonaro by 51.8 to 48.2 percent. It is a real defeat for the far right and a deserved occasion for celebration. But it is not the end of Bolsonarismo. With its founder barred from office and sentenced to 27 years for his role in the coup plot, the movement still led the first round and carried nearly 60 million votes behind his son in the second, and Donald Trump was quick to call the result “another rigged election.” Within days, Flávio himself had reportedly left Brazil despite a court order to surrender his passports, and the Trump administration announced it would grant him and his family U.S. visas, making him the second Bolsonaro to seek refuge in the United States after defeat. What survived the loss of its leader is precisely what a structural account would predict: a mass base produced by the contradictions of dependent capitalism, which no single election resolves.
The current political conjuncture in Latin America, characterized by an ascendant far-right, demands more than the language of populism or democratic backsliding. What we are witnessing in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and El Salvador, among other nations, is not a novelty — not a local variant of a universal trend, and not a straightforward replay of the military dictatorships of the 1970s. It is a return, under radically transformed conditions, of a phenomenon that Latin American Marxists theorized with remarkable precision half a century ago: dependent fascism.
The concept comes from Theotônio dos Santos, writing in the crucible of the 1970s dictatorships. For dos Santos, dependent fascism was a counterrevolutionary political formation specific to the periphery of the capitalist world system — tied not to the inter-imperialist rivalries that produced classical European fascism, but to the structural contradictions of dependent capitalist development: chronic surplus transfer to the metropolis, the limits of peripheral accumulation, and the subordinate insertion of Latin American economies into the global order. When those contradictions produce a crisis of hegemony — when existing mechanisms of political representation collapse and dominant class fractions can no longer secure consent — dependent fascism becomes a structural possibility. While the phenomenon extends across the region — from Ecuador to El Salvador — I develop this argument through three cases: Brazil and Argentina as structurally comparable but formally distinct expressions of dependent fascism, and Mexico as a theoretically illuminating negative case where the structural conditions are present but the outcome has not materialized.
The Theoretical Tradition and Its Unresolved Debate
The classical Marxist tradition provides the essential foundation: fascism as an organic product of capitalism’s structural contradictions, built on a petty-bourgeois social base, and functioning to restore the conditions of capital reproduction. Thalheimer, Trotsky, and Gramsci, among others, each deepened this framework — Thalheimer through his analysis of fascism as Bonapartism, the bourgeoisie surrendering political power to retain economic power; Trotsky through his insistence on the mass movement character of fascism and the desperate petty bourgeoisie as its social engine; Gramsci through his account of organic crisis and the construction of hegemonic consent. Yet it is worth recalling that Gramsci was not theorizing fascism from within a fully developed North Atlantic capitalism. Italy in the 1920s was marked by profound unevenness — an industrialized north, an agrarian and pre-capitalist south, a subordinate relationship to French and British capital, and a bourgeois revolution that had never fully displaced the old agrarian bloc. There is a deep theoretical affinity between this dimension of Gramsci’s thought and the Latin American Marxist tradition — not necessarily a direct intellectual lineage, but a convergence produced by thinkers grappling, from different vantage points, with the specific political dynamics of peripheral and unevenly developed capitalist societies.
Drawing on Marini, Bambirra, and dos Santos, dependency theory provides tools for understanding not only the economic logic of the dependent periphery but the political crises and class conflicts these structural conditions generate. A critical internal debate, however, must be acknowledged. Dos Santos’s colleague Ruy Mauro Marini resisted the fascism label for the 1970s dictatorships on precisely defined grounds: classical fascism required a genuine petty-bourgeois mass movement, and the structural conditions of hyper-exploitation in the dependent periphery made that kind of popular counterrevolutionary mobilization impossible. The dictatorships of Pinochet, Videla, and the Brazilian generals ruled through concentrated state terror, not through the construction of a hegemonic mass project — counterinsurgency states, in Marini’s account, not fascist ones. Dos Santos retained the fascism label by treating mass mobilization as inessential and defining fascism as a regime of exception of big capital responding to imperialist crisis. The debate was never resolved.
What makes the current conjuncture theoretically significant is that it may actually resolve that debate in a direction neither fully anticipated. Bolsonaro and Milei did what the 1970s military dictators demonstrably could not: they built genuine mass movements, came to power through elections rather than coups, and mobilized the petty bourgeoisie and downwardly mobile sectors in ways that closely resemble the classical fascist form Marini was using as his benchmark. In satisfying Marini’s criterion of mass mobilization while also fulfilling dos Santos’s structural and functional definition, contemporary dependent fascism is paradoxically a better fit for the concept than the 1970s dictatorships themselves.
There is, however, a crucial difference from the dependency theorists’ conjuncture. Marini and dos Santos were theorizing counterrevolution against actual revolution — the Cuban revolution, Allende’s Unidad Popular, mass popular movements with genuine socialist horizons. Today there is no comparable revolutionary threat. What we have instead is something closer to Gramsci’s organic crisis — political space opening for counterrevolutionary formations not because revolution is imminent but because neoliberal dependent capitalism has generated a vast reservoir of legitimate grievances that no credible left formation has captured. Contemporary dependent fascism is preventive rather than reactive, moving into the vacuum before any revolutionary alternative can consolidate. And the path from structural crisis to counterrevolutionary politics is never reducible to class alone — it runs through race, gender, and sexuality as well, and through the specific hierarchies whose erosion under neoliberal dependent capitalism has made downwardly mobile sectors available for reactionary mobilization. Contemporary dependent fascism does not operate through the explicit biological racism of classical fascism but through the demonization of the racialized poor — the favela resident, the welfare recipient, the beneficiary of redistributive programs — figures whose racial coding is inseparable from their position in the dependent class structure. Race is laundered through class resentment, rendered deniable, but no less constitutive for that.
A similar logic operates through gender and sexuality. The ‘gender ideology’ panic — the mobilization of reactionary anxiety around women’s autonomy, LGBTQ+ visibility, and the perceived dissolution of patriarchal social hierarchies — is not incidental to these movements but constitutive of them. For the downwardly mobile petty-bourgeois sectors that dependent fascism organizes, the (relative) erosion of patriarchal privilege under neoliberalism compounds the erosion of economic security: both represent the liquidation of the compensatory hierarchies through which subordinate class positions were historically made bearable. Race is laundered through class resentment; gender panic is laundered through it as well — rendered as a defense of ‘civilization’ and ‘natural order’ rather than as the reassertion of male dominance over women and sexual minorities whose growing social presence threatens a world in which masculine authority provided reliable compensation for class subordination.
Brazil: Bolsonarismo Without Bolsonaro
The rise of Bolsonaro was the political condensation of a specific multidimensional crisis. At its foundation was the exhaustion of the PT’s neo-developmentalist project — a model that achieved meaningful redistributive gains during the commodity boom without fundamentally altering Brazil’s subordinate insertion into the global economy. When commodity prices collapsed after 2011, the structural limits of the model became impossible to manage. The fragile multiclass coalition linking organized labor, sections of the industrial bourgeoisie, and the emerging consumption class of the periphery began to fracture.
What followed was a cascading crisis of political representation. Operation Car Wash functioned in practice as a judicial-political assault that demolished institutional credibility across the board without producing any alternative capable of restoring hegemonic order. The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff completed the demolition of PT legitimacy while doing nothing to restore the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. Into the representational vacuum that followed, Bolsonarismo moved — organizing above all a reactionary middle class through anti-PT discourse, evangelical religious networks, and a hyper-masculine, patriarchal moral conservatism. The evangelical networks were particularly central to this mobilization: they provided the organizational infrastructure through which gender panic — the assault on “gender ideology,” the criminalization of abortion, the targeting of LGBTQ+ communities and feminist movements — was translated into mass political energy, fusing economic resentment with a reactionary defense of patriarchal family structures and sexual hierarchy. But this movement from below was rapidly co-opted by dominant class fractions who recognized in it a vehicle for the structural reforms — pension reform, central bank autonomy, labor flexibilization, deepened agribusiness export circuits — that the PT had resisted and the PSDB had failed to deliver.
Bolsonaro’s actual program bore no resemblance to its anti-establishment rhetoric. The political discourse through which this restoration was accomplished — the demonization of the PT as a corrupt communist conspiracy, the racial and class coding of its beneficiaries as an undeserving welfare class — served to channel the legitimate grievances of the crisis toward an anti-redistributive project that intensified the structural conditions producing those grievances. Brazil is the textbook case: a movement that emerged from the contradictions of dependent capitalism, organized a petty-bourgeois social base around a crisis of hegemony, and ultimately restored accumulation for dominant and internationally integrated class fractions.
Lula’s October victory confirms this reading rather than refuting it. A movement built around a personality should have collapsed once its leader was imprisoned and its candidate defeated; Bolsonarismo instead carried nearly half the electorate and the country’s economic center, São Paulo. Its mass base is the product of structural conditions, and those conditions remain in place. The election also makes visible the hierarchical relationship between dependent fascism and the core. Washington imposed punitive tariffs and sanctions on Brazil in 2025 in response to Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution, Trump has now disputed the result, and the United States has become the refuge of a defeated peripheral far right. Lula’s coalition won as a broad democratic front, defending institutions against a movement that had tried to overturn them. That defensive victory matters. But a front that defeats the far right at the ballot box without transforming Brazil’s subordinate insertion into the world economy has won time, not the conjuncture.
Argentina: The Harder Case
Argentina presents a structurally comparable but analytically more demanding situation. The Kirchnerist project, like the PT in Brazil, achieved meaningful redistributive gains without resolving Argentina’s fundamental structural vulnerabilities: its chronic balance of payments constraint, the power of the agro-export sector, and the persistent subordination of its financial system to international capital flows and dollar-denominated debt. The Macri interlude produced a rapid deterioration of living standards and a catastrophic return to the debt cycle. When the Peronist coalition returned under Alberto Fernández it inherited an economy in crisis without the political capacity to address its structural roots. By 2023, with inflation exceeding 200 percent annually, the institutional credibility of both major political traditions had collapsed entirely.
It is out of this compounding crisis that Javier Milei emerged — and he poses a genuine theoretical challenge that must be confronted directly. Milei’s ideological self-presentation is not nationalist but explicitly anarcho-capitalist. He invokes Mises and Rothbard rather than any fascist tradition. His followers present him as the ideological antithesis of fascism. If dependent fascism is defined by its ideological form — nationalism, anti-liberalism, biological racism — Milei does not fit. But that is precisely the wrong level at which to define it. Ideology is the form through which political projects present themselves; it is not the substance of what they do.
Look past the ideological self-description and the fascist political form becomes unmistakable. Milei’s social base — downwardly mobile urban middle classes, precarious young men, small business owners devastated by inflation — maps directly onto the petty-bourgeois constituency that dependent fascism organizes. His political style is authoritarian and anti-institutional at its core: the deliberate dismantling of state capacity, the assault on the judiciary, the legislature, the media, and the universities, the construction of a direct leader-people relationship that bypasses all institutional mediation, the channeling of genuine grievances through a conspiratorial narrative that names the “caste” as the internal enemy while obscuring the structural sources of crisis. That the enemy is named “the caste” rather than “the communists” does not change the structure of the political operation.
Most importantly, consider the program. Milei’s dollarization proposal, his elimination of the central bank, his submission to IMF conditionality — none of this represents a break from Argentina’s dependent relationship to international capital. It represents its intensification and voluntary embrace. Legitimate grievances generated by dependent accumulation are captured and redirected toward the further deepening of the structural conditions that produced them. What unifies Bolsonarismo and Mileismo is not a shared ideology but a shared function and social base: both emerge from the contradictions of dependent capitalism, both organize a downwardly mobile petty-bourgeois constituency around a crisis of hegemony, and both ultimately restore accumulation for dominant and internationally integrated class fractions — regardless of the ideological idiom through which they accomplish this.
Mexico: Why the Outcome Is Never Inevitable
Mexico is potentially the most theoretically illuminating case precisely because it diverges from the regional pattern. The structural conditions for dependent fascism are fully present: deep dependency institutionalized through NAFTA, chronic precarity, a prolonged security crisis, and widespread institutional delegitimation after two PAN presidencies defined by the catastrophic militarized drug war. The conditions for a mass movement channeling legitimate grievances through a reactionary political project were all structurally present. And yet no comparable movement emerged. The representational vacuum was filled from the left before the right could consolidate it. Morena and López Obrador channeled the same anti-establishment rage and experience of institutional betrayal through a reformist nationalist anti-neoliberal project. The grievances were structurally identical to those that produced Bolsonarismo and Mileismo. What differed was who got to name them — and toward what end. AMLO constructed a hegemonic project that articulated popular discontent through an anti-oligarchic nationalist frame, directing anger at the neoliberal technocratic elite rather than at the racialized poor or the internal enemy. It was, in Gramscian terms, a war of position that won the conjuncture. Mexico identifies precisely where the contingency of dependent fascism lies — not in the structural conditions, which were all present, but in the political struggle over articulation. The answer to the question of which forces can credibly claim the crisis is never structurally determined. It is the product of political organization, ideological work, and the contingent history of movement building that determines which articulation becomes hegemonic.
This is not to idealize the Morena project. Critics from the left — notably Massimo Modonesi and Jeffery Webber — have argued persuasively that AMLO’s administration acted as a passive revolutionary force that demobilized the insurgent social base that made its electoral victory possible, subordinating grassroots movements to a personalist and ultimately accommodationist project that left the fundamental structures of dependent accumulation intact. Their critique extends a long line of analysis, developed most fully by Adam David Morton, that reads the modern Mexican state itself as a product of passive revolution. These are serious critiques and the contradictions of Morena are real. What Mexico demonstrates is not that the left won, but that a left-nationalist articulation of the organic crisis can foreclose the terrain available to dependent fascism — a foreclosure that may be temporary, partial, and politically costly, but that nonetheless represents a structurally significant difference from the Brazilian and Argentine trajectories.
What the Cases Establish
Dependent fascism is not a relic of the 1970s. It is a structural possibility inscribed in the logic of dependent capitalist development — one that becomes politically actual when crises of accumulation and hegemony go unanswered, and when the experiences of precarity and betrayal they generate get captured by reactionary rather than emancipatory forces. Brazil and Argentina show us what that capture looks like — different in ideological form, identical in structural function. Mexico shows us that it is not inevitable. Brazil’s October election shows both at once: the far right can be defeated, but the conditions that produce it outlast any single defeat. The terrain may be structurally produced; the political outcome never is. What this demands politically is a left capable of capturing organic crisis before the right does — capable of naming the structural sources of precarity and betrayal and offering an emancipatory rather than reactionary articulation of the legitimate fury they generate. Nor is the content of that outcome determined in advance: an emancipatory articulation of organic crisis must address not only the structural conditions of dependent accumulation but the racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies through which those conditions are lived, resented, and politically mobilized. The question is not whether the conditions for dependent fascism exist in Latin America. They manifestly do, and the crisis of neoliberal dependent capitalism is deepening them. The question is who gets to name those conditions — and whether the left can build the organizational and ideological capacity to answer that question before the authoritarian right answers it for them.
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