By Gabriel Pereira
In 2025, Latin American democracy revealed itself less as a stable institutional order than as a field of permanent political struggle. Across the region, courts, rights, and political identities became sites of intense contestation. Through the Review of Democracy, I had the opportunity this year to engage with five books that, taken together, help make sense of this moment.
What connects these works is not simply their regional focus, but the way they illuminate three intertwined dimensions of contemporary politics: the arenas where democratic conflict is fought, the actors who occupy them, and the tools they deploy. From courts and legal mobilization to anti-rights movements and neofascist politics, these books map the architecture of democratic conflict in Latin America today.
Law and Courts as Political Arenas
Two of the books I reviewed this year focus directly on how law and courts have become central arenas of political struggle.
In Catalina Smulovitz’s El Descubrimiento de la Ley, reviewed in my RevDem essay “The Politics of Legal Discovery in Argentina”, the core argument is that law does not become politically powerful by constitutional design alone. It becomes powerful when political actors learn how to use it. Smulovitz traces how litigants, activists, politicians, and journalists in Argentina gradually “discovered” the law as a strategic resource for advancing or blocking political claims. Courts, in this account, are not neutral arbiters standing outside politics, but institutional spaces that can be activated by those who know how to navigate them.
This perspective is especially important in a region where judicialization has expanded rapidly. Smulovitz helps us see that this expansion is not merely institutional; it is political. Law becomes a battlefield when actors on all sides learn to fight within it.
A complementary perspective appears in Sandra Botero’s When Do Courts Matter?, which I reviewed for RevDem. It asks a deceptively simple question: under what conditions do courts actually shape political outcomes? Rather than assuming judicial power, she develops a comparative framework that shows how courts become influential—or remain marginal—depending on political competition, institutional design, and patterns of mobilization. Courts matter when political actors have incentives to turn to them, and when judicial institutions are capable of responding.
Read together, Smulovitz and Botero redefine how we should think about democracy in Latin America. The key question is no longer whether courts exist or what constitutions say, but how political actors learn to use legal arenas—and when those arenas become consequential.
Who Fights in Those Arenas?
Once law and courts are understood as central arenas of democratic conflict, the next question is obvious: who occupies them?
That is where Leigh Payne, Julia Zulver, and Simón Escoffier’s The Right against Rights in Latin America becomes indispensable. In my RevDem conversation with the authors,
they show that a new wave of political actors has emerged across the region whose defining feature is opposition to rights themselves. These are not merely conservative groups advocating traditional values; they are organized coalitions that strategically mobilize law, courts, and legislatures to block, reverse, and delegitimize rights claims by women, LGBTQ+ communities, indigenous peoples, and human rights movements.
What makes these actors particularly consequential is that they operate inside the very institutional arenas that were once associated with rights expansion. Litigation, constitutional arguments, and judicial review—tools originally used by progressive movements—are now being redeployed against them. The book forces us to see anti-rights mobilization not as episodic backlash but as a durable political project.
That project, however, unfolds within a broader reconfiguration of right-wing politics. This is where André Borges, Ryan Lloyd, and Gabriel Vommaro’s The Recasting of the Latin American Right enters the picture. In a two-part Review of Democracy podcast, the editors explain how conservative politics in the region has been transformed since the early 2000s. The Pink Tide, cultural conflicts over gender and identity, and new forms of political entrepreneurship have reshaped both parties and voters.
The result is a heterogeneous right that is neither simply neoliberal nor uniformly authoritarian. Some actors seek electoral respectability; others thrive on polarization. Anti-rights mobilization is one of the most dynamic forces within this broader field. Seen through this lens, the struggle over law and courts is not peripheral—it is a core dimension of contemporary right-wing politics.
When Democratic Conflict Turns Authoritarian
The most extreme version of these dynamics appears in Odilon Caldeira Neto’s Neofascism and the Far Right in Brazil, also showcased in the RevDem. Caldeira Neto’s contribution is to insist that not all far-right politics is the same. He identifies neofascism as a specific ideological and organizational project that seeks not just to win elections but to delegitimize pluralism itself. Through symbols, narratives, and networks—often amplified by digital media—neofascist actors in Brazil have worked to erode trust in democratic institutions and normalize authoritarian solutions.
This case matters beyond Brazil. It shows how struggles over courts, rights, and identity can escalate into a broader assault on democracy. When legal and cultural battles become vehicles for exclusionary, authoritarian politics, the very rules of the democratic game are put at risk.
Arenas, Actors, and Tools
Taken together, these five books reveal a coherent picture of democracy in Latin America in 2025.
Smulovitz and Botero show us the arenas: law and courts as central sites of political struggle.
Payne, Zulver, Escoffier, Borges, Lloyd, and Vommaro identify the actors: anti-rights coalitions and a reconfigured right that competes for power within and against democratic institutions.
Caldeira Neto exposes the dangerous edge of this process, where democratic conflict tips into neofascist mobilization.
For anyone trying to understand where Latin American democracy is headed, these books offer more than isolated insights. They map the terrain on which the future of rights, institutions, and political inclusion will be decided.
In 2025, democracy in the region is not collapsing—but it is being fought over. And these five books show us exactly how.
