La impotencia democrática en un espejo distorsionado: apuntes sobre el nuevo antiglobalismo latinoamericanoThe Disempowerment of Democracy in a Distorted Mirror: Notes on the New Latin American Antiglobalism

Abstract This article examines the emergence of the “New Latin American Antiglobalism”: a set of discourses that are exceptionally hostile toward the international legal order and that have gained increasing prominence in the region alongside the recent rise of the new right. The paper reconstructs these narratives and analyzes their specific Latin American features. Its central argument is that antiglobalism resonates in the region because it channels a deep-seated discontent toward a global legal order that has disempowered democratic institutions, rendering them unable to fulfill their promises. Drawing on Naomi Klein’s notion of the “döppelganger,” however, the article argues that the New Latin American Antiglobalism operates as an inverted, distorted image of that discontent: it captures genuine frustrations with a global legal order that constraints self-government but reconfigures them into simplifying and distortive narratives that may ultimately deepen—rather than remedy—the disempowerment of democracy in the region.