A few weeks ago, the work on the two free trade agreements with Mexico and theMercosur area (which includes Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and virtually Venezuela) was concluded.
Trump’s erratic choices have made this rapprochement seem even more urgent.
But how much do we really know about each other? Are the inhabitants of those six countries more or less like us than we imagine? We talked about this with Prof. Loris Zanatta, professor of History of Latin America at the University of Bologna.

Good evening Professor. Reading the data, 96% of Argentinians are descendants of Europeans, between 80% and 90% of Brazilians, 93% of Mexicans and Venezuelans. Yet, when we think of these countries, we think of places very different from Europe. Is this perception correct?

This perception is half correct. Latin America is a largely mestizo continent: for its inhabitants, European origin undoubtedly counts, but so does the indigenous one. To claim, however, that from this ethnic diversity also derives a diversity in principles, values and political culture is not entirely correct.

The Latin American world in fact derives from the Hispanic world of the Counter-Reformation. Modernity, secularisation and liberalism, which in the Protestant countries of northern Europe had spread spontaneously (for reasons that it would take too long to list), in the Catholic countries had to clash with the ‘armour of Christendom’, which made no distinction between the subject and the faithful and reabsorbed the individual into the collective.

This clash also took place in Latin American countries. Which, moreover, having the Ocean in between, were considered a laboratory for realising Christian society even better than in Europe. Precisely because of this greater resistance, the modern citizen often had to be created in the Americas from above, paradoxically imposing liberal institutions through authoritarian regimes.

In your opinion, how much do the new generations still feel the connection with that ideal of a Christian society and how much, on the other hand, through the Internet and the change in consumption, are they becoming homologated to those in North America or Europe?

Too little is said about the enormous change brought about by the opening of the ‘religious market’ in Latin America. In many countries, Catholics are no longer in the majority. In addition, the inhabitants of urban centres, especially the younger ones, travel more than in the past and are becoming increasingly cosmopolitan. A Brazilian colleague of mine speaks of a ‘Greater Europe’ extended to the Americas.

This pluralism, however, does not mean that politics is also becoming desacralised. Quite the contrary.
Even a pro-Western, free-market leader like Javier Milei presents himself as a new founder of religions, a world caudillo rising above the law. Even among Latin American Protestants, there are those who also have an idea of politics as a religious war.

I am thinking of certain supporters of Jair Bolsonaro! Let us come instead to Trump’s tantrums. They have already pushed Canadians to rediscover their affinity with Europeans and to seek protection in Europe. Could something similar happen with Mexico and the Mercosur countries?

If Trump thinks he can make America great again with his current strategy, he is deluding himself. The success of great powers is based on their ability to elevate themselves as role models for others. Clashing with everyone, as Trump is doing, leads nowhere and is only dangerous.

Among the Mercosur area countries, Brazil has always had a pragmatic foreign policy: it has joined the Brics but taking care not to break relations with the United States, it is opening up to Chinese penetration but at the same time evaluating the free trade agreement with Europe. Even though Lula’s last term in office was unusually anti-Western, we should not expect major ruptures with anyone from Brazil.

Argentina, on the other hand, has always swung in its foreign policy according to political preferences: the Peronists looked to the enemies of the West and the anti-Peronists to the West. The question is: what is the West today? In Carlos Menem’s time, the West meant Reagan. But now?
The liberalist Milei, who first embraces Zelensky and then votes against Ukraine at the UN in deference to the protectionist Trump, is emblematic of this confusion.

As for Mexico, it has intimate ties mainly with Spain (because Mexico was New Spain for centuries) and France (considered a cultural model). But it is a country hybridised with the United States on everything, starting with millions of mixed families. It may have great sympathy for Europe, especially under the current administration of Claudia Scheinbaum, but it remains a country whose destiny is tied to the United States. This is why Trump’s policies will not bring the desired results. In general, Western countries would have an interest in strengthening ties with each other.

About the definition of ‘Western countries’. From Mexico on down, especially in the wake of the rhetoric of the 20th century regimes, they have become accustomed to seeing the West (or the ‘global north’) as a foreign, colonising entity. Is this still the case?

Victimhood is the most popular sport in Latin America. In a mental and religious universe like the Catholic one, playing the victim can bring extraordinary political dividends. The victim, in the Catholic moral imaginary, always gains consensus and sympathy.

Now, this idea of Latin America fighting the West is an intellectual construction, first Catholic and then Marxist. They call it ‘The West dominating the Latin American periphery‘, but this ideological scheme, if we strip it of all its trappings, is actually the eternal struggle of Catholic Europe against Protestant Europe. It is actually an internal struggle within the Western world, within the European world.

The phenomena such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the Peronists, who fought the West in the name of anti-imperialism, were actually fighting the innovations that arose in the West from the Protestant world and against which they continued to idealise the values of the Catholic matrix.
It is the old imperial Spain fighting the eternal enemy, which is basically the Enlightenment. They are neo-Hispanic phenomena that have never digested the Enlightenment, accused of corrupting the ‘pure people’ of Latin America.

Many of these countries, however, when they became enlightened or capitalist, did well. Until the 1970s Venezuela was much better off than Spain, Argentina was firmly among the ten richest countries in the world, Uruguay and Chile were well off… in short, they were not always the victims and losers of history: for a long time they were winners.

In apocalyptic readings of history, what matters is not reality. If one measures history against the ideal of the Kingdom of God on earth, the stories of men will always be failures. Their idea is that history is still degeneration, development is still conflict, inequality and moral sin. It is no coincidence that this type of anti-Western movement often ends up theorising about holy poverty. The spiritually superior man for them is the one who resists the ravages of progress. There is, therefore, no direct relationship between economic growth and an optimistic or pessimistic reading of history. In their view of history, modernity is sin: it has broken up the original unity and nothing can ever recompose it.

Have the leaders of the opposition to Venezuelan Chavismo, such as Maria Corina Machado, presented themselves as charismatic saviours or as restorers of the Enlightenment? Which rhetoric did they choose?

Machado is a charismatic figure, and it could not be otherwise. In contexts of high personalisation of politics, such as Chavismo, it is almost inevitable that oppositions become something equal and opposite: they have to find an equally charismatic figure of reference, and Machado lends herself very well to this.

At the same time, however, hers is a very different charisma from the one we saw in Mexico with López Obrador or in Argentina with Milei. Machado appeals to Venezuelans in a plural sense. Should she get into government, which I hope she will, I don’t know what to expect, but she seems to me to be a figure more bound to institutionalism and more open to the pluralism that exists in Venezuelan society. She is a good figure, definitely.

Sure, she has relied on allies who are not on the same wavelength as her, like Trump and Milei. But there is a great lack of our democratic countries behind it: inhibited by the image of chavismo as a popular and progressive movement (in line with the usual way Europe reads Latin America), they have not had the courage to face it for what it is.

Our countries, in fact, continue to stand on the pedestal and to imagine the Mercosur countries as the old poor colonies, towards which any step we take is always a step of the old masters coming back to bother us. A reading that is no longer real?

Perhaps it never was.

About the free trade agreement: comparing the Italian economy with those of Brazil or Mexico, they really look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle made to fit together. They do everything we need and we do everything they need. In light of this, listening to the arguments against the free trade agreement being waved around in Italy is culturally interesting. They say, “They are poor countries and we, by making the agreement, are legitimising the exploitation of campesinos, the deforestation of the Amazon…”

These are purely ideological arguments that correspond to a caricatured representation of Latin America. You know? In Italy, as often in Latin America, sovereignist and nationalist tendencies bring right and left wing segments together in an extraordinary way: their problem is always the free market. Those arguments come from an anti-capitalist and anti-modern world, or, especially from the right, from a corporatist nationalism that claims, for example, to protect rural producers from competition. In reality, we in Italy have always been very protectionist, and, like us, so far the Mercosur countries have been too.