President Javier Milei of Argentina and El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele will speak at the influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) next week, its officials announced.
CPAC is the nation's largest conservative conference, attended by activists and elected officials from the United States and other countries.
Its main event will be the speech of former President Donald Trump,
as in recent years.
This year it will occur from Wednesday, February 21 to Saturday the 24th.
Inviting these Latin American presidents is part of an effort by Republicans to reach out to Latinos and win their vote in the November elections, Mercedes Schlapp, senior researcher at the CPAC Foundation, explained in an exclusive interview with Noticias Telemundo.
For Schlapp, "reaching out to the Latino community is a priority. We know that Latinos are naturally conservative, they are of faith, family and country, and they are watching leftists destroy this country."
In her opinion, they promote "gender ideology and are trying to sexualize children and destroy the nuclear family... as a Latina I see that many Latinos feel that they have to protect their children. And they also cannot handle the current situation caused by President Biden, they cannot keep up with their salaries.
One of
the electoral issues that most keep Latinos awake is the high price of houses and rent, gasoline and jobs, far above immigration or issues such as abortion
, revealed one of the largest recent surveys among these voters. conducted by Unidos US.
"This is a very important moment for conservatives and Republicans," Schlapp said, "to make that connection with the Latino community and for them to understand that we support them and want their families to be successful in the United States and that we can protect them from the communists and leftists... Conservatives have to do a better job of communicating our message to the Latino community, telling them that they are welcome to our coalition."
[From Milei to Trump: why so many Venezuelan immigrants support right-wing candidates in Latin America and the US]
This effort includes speaking to different electoral blocs, such as Americans with connections to El Salvador and Argentina, in this case.
It is a strategy that the Republican Party has already used and taken advantage of in past elections, first with Cubans and more recently with Colombians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans.
"Our movement, as we are seeing, is international: when you have two presidents from Latin America, it is something impressive," said Schlapp, who was a senior strategic advisor to the Trump Administration.
Hearing directly from these leaders was important because they can communicate that "anti-communist, anti-leftist message, because they know the danger and damage of the communists in their countries, and in Latin America, in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba."
“Venezuela represents something like the specter of communism [...] The region's right has found in Venezuela a clear image that symbolizes the failures of that system,” Ariel Goldstein, a political scientist at the University of Buenos Aires, told NBC News. Aires.
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, left, and the president of Argentina, Javier Milei.
Getty Images
CPAC has been singled out for amplifying far-right voices such as Steve Bannon (sentenced to four months in prison for not testifying about his role in the attack on the Capitol) or Stephen Miller, one of the main authors of Trump's heavy-handed immigration policies. .
Other far-right leaders have also spoken, such as the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, who has said that “we do not want to become mixed race people” and who told the CPAC audience that “all globalists can go to hell” and criticized the “media.” of leftist communication.
Why Milei?
Despite criticism from the opposition in his country, Schlapp explained that for CPAC, Milei is one of the most important international leaders in achieving government reforms along the lines of "anti-globalization."
"As we know, there are so many Latinos in the US impressed with President Milei's message," Schlapp said, "which is to give power to the people instead of corruption. There are many international organizations, such as the United Nations , the World Economic Forum, who are in charge of directing politics internationally and that does not work.
CPAC officials have had Milei on their radar since before he was known outside of Argentina, when he spoke at CPAC Mexico.
Now, they want to echo Milei's most recent speech at the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, in which he "spoke of the importance of ensuring that international institutions do not control a people in a way that benefits the political classes." "Schlapp said.
Among Milei's main proposals to combat inflation is the dollarization of the economy and closing the Central Bank.
He has also proposed deregulating the legal arms market and
calling a popular plebiscite to repeal the law that legalized abortion
.
In his first speech as president, Milei stated that failure to comply with his economic adjustment plans would lead the country “into a spiral of decline that will bring us the darkness of the Venezuela of Chávez and Maduro,” referring to Hugo Chávez, president of 1998. to 2013, and to his successor, Nicolás Maduro.
The two other right-wing figures to whom Milei is often compared – Donald Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro – have attempted to mobilize voters with similar rhetoric.
Experts consider that this type of discourse has found a receptive audience among the growing Venezuelan diasporas throughout the region.
In recent years, more than 7.5 million people have left Venezuela, triggering the
most serious migration crisis in modern Latin American history
.
Many begin new lives with a marked opposition to leftist movements or candidates, which they associate with the disaster they had to leave behind.
In the United States, this dynamic has helped reinforce Latino support for Republicans in Florida, which has contributed to a shift to the right in recent elections in this state considered a
swing state
. for a long time.
Similar changes could be brewing in places across the continent with a high concentration of recent Venezuelan immigrants.
“The conditions that forced you to leave Venezuela
make you see everything in black and white
,” Eugenio Martínez, a Venezuelan political analyst living in Florida, told NBC News.
“But the policy of recipient countries is not black and white.”
Why Bukele?
The invitation to the Salvadoran president to speak at the conference was given because influential right-wing groups in the United States are "very impressed with Bukele and how he has managed to combat crime in his nation, combat gangs" and for his message "of how The countries have abandoned their values of religion, of God, of family. It has a message that inspires a lot and speaks to the hearts of Latinos in the United States, which is family, faith and homeland... We have seen that Bukele speaks to the Latino community," Schlapp said.
El Salvador has admitted "errors" in its war against gangs, and its vice president, Félix Ulloa, acknowledged that in the mass detention of citizens by his Administration, the Government
imprisoned thousands of people who had not committed any crime.
He specified that it is something they are correcting, but justified the harsh actions as being widely popular and completely “legal.”
Since declaring a state of emergency in March 2022 following a spike in violence, the Government has detained 76,000 people, more than 1% of the small Central American nation's population.
The declaration, which suspended fundamental rights such as access to a lawyer and being told why you are being detained, has been renewed by Congress every month since.
Trump, the main event
Former President Trump will speak on the final day of the conference, Saturday morning, and is expected to deliver a message of unification between conservatives and Republicans ahead of the general election.
Trump's speech will focus on "calling for unity in the Republican Party and focusing on the general election and defeating Joe Biden
," Schlapp said.
Other notable Latinos invited to the CPAC conference are Mexican presidential candidate Eduardo Verástegui;
Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro;
and the Argentine security minister Patricia Bullrich.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley is also invited but has not yet confirmed her attendance, Schlapp said.
On Saturday the Republican primary takes place in South Carolina, Haley's native state where she has put all her attention and resources.
Trump leads him there by 36 points in the polls.
At the same time, from February 23 to 25, what its organizers call “the anti-CPAC summit” will be held in Washington, in which prominent Republican critics of Trump will participate.
The group responsible,
Principles First,
says it is an event “focused on promoting more principled center-right politics in the United States,” according to the organization's website, and on “rebuilding principled leadership in service to our country, not to partisanship or a personality,” in a clear reference to Trump.