When a Certain Argentine Right Hates Mexicans

ByFernando Buen Abad Domínguez

This article by Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez originally appeared in the July 12, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

They are the same packs behind Hondurasgate. The attacks that some sectors of the Argentine right have perpetrated against Mexicans cannot be understood as a spontaneous reaction born of cultural or national differences. That interpretation reduces a complex phenomenon to a dispute between peoples who, in reality, share a history marked by similar processes of colonization, economic dependence, concentration of wealth, and popular resistance. When the right’s media spokesmen strip themselves bare and attack an entire country with the aim of disparaging it, they disguise their argument against the left as individualistic tantrums of ignorant, salaried loudmouths.

Mexico (at least five great pre-Hispanic civilizations) occupies a singular vanguard position within the continent. Its demographic weight, its industrial development, its proximity to the United States, its diplomatic tradition, and the legacy of a social revolution that profoundly transformed the state structure make it a permanent point of reference for discussion. No uniform assessment can encompass such complexity. There, advances, contradictions, social conflicts, persistent inequalities, and heterogeneous political experiences coexist. Reducing that diversity to a stereotype constitutes a deliberate impoverishment of analysis.

The semiotic contest opens over the meaning of the statements of the “journalistic” operator Eduardo Feinmann: “I detest Mexicans. I detest them with my soul”; he called them “detestable” and maintained that “they envy us” and “want to be like us.” In that xenophobic hatred, intoxicated with supremacist features (“they envy us”), dwells the disparagement of an entire people, which constitutes a generalization that is anything but naive. Who are those “us” of his statement, and what is it that “they envy us,” in what verifiable reality? Does he believe Milei is envied, along with his circus of corruption and shameless submission to Trump’s empire? Those who finance this operation are organizing a desperate attack. His superior “us” against a “them” is nationalism under the flag of Israel, like the one the media ventriloquist displays on his desk in every broadcast of his ideological-political operations disguised as a newscast.

It is not only that Feinmann “hates” Mexicans; Latin American history offers abundant examples of this operation. The dominant classes frequently found greater political profitability in stirring up antagonisms between peoples rather than allowing attention to focus on the relations of exploitation existing within each society. Thus, the logic of regional fragmentation weakened projects of economic, scientific, and cultural cooperation capable of reducing dependence on the great centers of global accumulation. Each episode of symbolic confrontation between Latin American nations fed that dispersion.

Their business and the need to produce external enemies when internal social contradictions intensify function as an ideological displacement of conflicts derived from the concentration of capital. Mexico represents a historical, cultural, intellectual, diplomatic, and political tradition that, at various moments, has defended sovereigntist, integrationist, and regionally autonomous projects. That legacy discomfits sectors aligned with the hemispheric rights subordinated to Washington. There is no spontaneous Argentine-Mexican conflict; there is a transnational circulation of narratives produced by influence networks, political consultancies, media, and algorithms that turn any disagreement between leaders into antagonism between peoples. Hondurasgate, for example.

That Zionist hostility diverts attention from the private appropriation of the social surplus, from financialization, from labor precarization, and from the loss of economic sovereignty. It is the use of cultural contempt as a mechanism for legitimizing hierarchies. Ridiculing accents, customs, or national symbols constitutes a form of symbolic violence that prepares the acceptance of material relations of domination. Mexico appears incorporated into that imaginary map when certain administrations promote economic, social, or diplomatic policies considered incompatible with the neoliberal ideology. The confrontation then ceases to be directed exclusively at a specific government and begins to contaminate public perception of the country as a whole. Criticism abandons the institutional terrain to slide toward national prejudices that explain little and distort much.

Thus, the decisive thing consists in identifying the social conditions that make possible the expansion of hostile discourses between historically linked peoples. From that perspective, any attempt to turn Mexicans and Argentines into permanent adversaries impoverishes the region’s political intelligence and weakens the possibilities of building higher forms of cooperation, social justice, and collective emancipation. In certain currents of the contemporary right, some media spokesmen turn national and geopolitical symbols –among them, the flag of the State of Israel when they use it as a political emblem– into devices for legitimizing a hierarchical imaginary that naturalizes class privileges, displaces social conflict toward culture wars, and strengthens a consciousness functional to the reproduction of capital.

There bourgeois supremacism is born, not as a psychological extravagance of arrogant individuals, nor as a simple rhetorical excess, but rather as a historical rationality destined to transform particular interests into universal criteria of truth. Its greatest effectiveness consists in getting the majorities to interpret the world with categories produced by those who administer the accumulation of capital.

Certain sectors of the Argentine right reproduce that intellectual architecture with notable discipline. Their media spokesmen represent a function whose importance surpasses everyday commentary. They do not inform; they produce hatred. Each intervention distorts symbolic hierarchies, slanders reputations, decides who deserves recognition and who must occupy the place of public contempt. The operation acquires special intensity when the conflicts derived from economic concentration threaten to reveal the structural character of inequality. At that moment it becomes indispensable to displace the conversation toward cultural enemies, national identities, moral disputes, or symbolic wars that fragment any possibility of collective understanding. At any cost. The dispute is open.