Monks and Revolutionaries: Right-Wing Youth in Mexico and Argentina during the 1960s

An age of renovation and radicalization for the Latin American Left, the 1960s were also a key period for the reconfiguration and transnationalization of the Right. In these years, anti-communists, counterrevolutionaries, and right wing nationalists found fertile ground to reassess the meanings and methods of their political struggle in relation to the local and global Cold War. This paper examines the Argentine neo-fascist group Tacuara and the Mexican MURO as two distinct manifestations of the encounter between fascism, Catholic nationalisms, and the revolutionary imagination of Third Worldism. Stirred by the Cuban revolution and by the growth of global neo-fascism, the young neo-fascists of Argentina and Mexico reinterpreted their own political traditions and distanced themselves from previous generations of right wing activists to portray themselves as agents of a Catholic, anti-communist, and nationalist revolution led by the youth. With a strong Catholic identity, a neo-fascist longing for violence, these groups partook of the renovation of the Global Right and played an important but often neglected part in the politics of youth radicalism in this period.