Latin America’s right-wing shift: cruelty and the government of other bodies during the neoliberal stage of capital

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between the recent rise to power of right-wing governments across Latin America, the imperialist dynamics of systems designed to exert control over bodies as structured by the region's nation-states, the neoliberal stage of capital and what is herein identified as the patriarchal-colonial canalization of cruelty. The premise being set forth is that the ideological shift towards the right-wing as manifested throughout the region, represents a direct expression of the manner in which the normalized dynamics of control that have long governed and controlled bodies across the Latin American continent, has been renewed with the rise of neoliberalism. This control is sustained by a current of the cruelty derived from the colonial matrix, in which suffering is canalized towards the bodies relegated to the position of the ‘Other’; non-white, non-binary, non-male, etc. An attempt will be made to demonstrate that right-wing Latin American governments have deepened the pre-existing divide between —on the one hand—bodies who are targeted by biopolitical strategies and —on the other— of bodies who are the object of cruelty as a means of governing them. This shall be done through a comparative analysis of right-wing governments in Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru; drawing on a feminist reading of Fanón. This analysis is set against within the bounds of de-colonial and post-colonial feminist epistemologies and feminist cultural studies, which —since the late 90s— have been positioning affections and ‘embodiment’ as categories that fuel a radical commitment towards understanding and transforming the relationship between politics and culture.