From The Dial
The country’s far right found a model in the former U.S. president.
José Derman decided to repurpose his family’s home in La Plata, the capital of the Buenos Aires province, shortly after his mother passed away in 2020. He emptied the house, sold her old clothes and books, and painted the walls. With the help of two “comrades,” the house soon became the Kyle Rittenhouse Cultural Center, named after a white supremacist in the United States who shot three people at a protest against the police shooting of a Black man in 2020. A portrait of Rittenhouse adorns one of the inside walls, next to murals of Javier Milei, now Argentina’s president but at the time a new far-right political figure, and former President Donald Trump, among others.
Derman and his team started by organizing anti-quarantine protests, then attacked and threatened the headquarters of the leftist party Izquierda Socialista in La Plata. “We wanted to provoke them,” Derman told me in an interview. “To break the monopoly of expression in the hands of Marxism and feminism.” They also took part in protests to support so-called “victims of censorship” — far-right activists who have been sued for hate speech by politicians in recent years.
The plan for the cultural center was to attract more members and host weekly activities, workshops and meetings. But in September 2022, Derman faced a police investigation after he posted a video praising an assassination attempt on then-Vice President Cristina Kirchner, a progressive politician, and called for an armed rebellion “to put an end to communism.” The center was raided by the police and, ultimately, shuttered.
Derman’s hatred of progressive politicians is extreme, and there are few Argentinians who would sympathize with his call for a violent overthrow of the political establishment. But the 40-year-old’sstory is also part of a broader backlash against left-wing politics that has quietly taken hold in Argentina, largely fueled by those who feel left behind by progressive policies — and have found a model for rebellion in Donald Trump and his supporters.
Lucía Cholakian Herrera is an independent correspondent based in Buenos Aires who covers politics and human rights in Argentina and Latin America.