Current Traces Of The Cold War: Post-soviet Anticommunism In Mexico And The New Regional Ideological Dispute

While common among political elites during the years of PRI rule as a dominant political party, anti-Communist discourse was never front and center of the national conversation in Mexico until very recently. This work understands the Cold War as a historical process characterized by a bipolar dispute among two projects regarding how to embrace modernity on a global scale. Thus, the main factor which defined this geopolitical scenario in the countries caught between the two blocs was Cold War anticommunism, understood not as an opposition to Marxist ideas but as an opposition to a real fear of alleged Soviet expansionism of either military or political nature. This exposition, therefore, argues that this ideological imaginary, which builds antagonisms by thinking their adversaries necessarily embody a “foreign menace” rather than being a legitimate democratic rival, has a continuity line in Latín America in the current ideological dispute between “liberalism and populism”. This exploration exposes the case of the Mexican election of 2006, where anticommunist strategies were massively deployed, to a scale which can not be understood but only in the frame of the reuse of Cold War practices in a post-Soviet frame of reference.