President of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, in Madrid, Spain. February 23, 2017. Alter Photos/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.
After Trump’s victory in the US, and on the eve of elections in France in which the far right is leading many polls, there seems little doubt about the direction the world is taking. But anyone wanting to know the future that the new right has planned for us could do well to look not only at Russia or Poland but further south as well. Just as, at the dawn of the neoliberal age, the Pinochet dictatorship was the testing ground for its “shock doctrine,” today the countries of the global south, like Argentina, Brazil and the Philippines, are the laboratories where the plans of Trump, Le Pen & Co. are put to the test. Another anniversary of the 1976 coup in Argentina (24 March – a date that the current government under President Mauricio Macri would like to uncouple from the National Day of Memory) offers the opportunity to assess the experiments under way. These target any possibility of a participative and egalitarian democracy. In spite of the savage and unprecedented cuts to budgets for science, technology and education (for example some 60% sliced from the fund for early-career researchers), in the laboratory of the new right, there are plenty of new knowledge producers, specialising in “alternative facts.”
Applied Xenophobia
