What is the Forum of São Paulo? And why is the far-right so obsessed with it?

A few years removed from the commodities boom that elevated local economies and lifted millions out of poverty, Latin America has been working off a pretty severe hangover. Brazil and Argentina have seen inequality levels rise; the people are protesting on the streets of Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador; the Peruvian president was almost ousted, and Venezuela is enduring the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western hemisphere. 

For Brazil’s far-right, all of these cases have a common thread: they are the fault of the Forum of São Paulo.

This left-wing conference—created 29 years ago by the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—is now far more important to the right than it is to the left. 

For the former, it is a sort of bogeyman, a mysterious group of communist plotters elevated well beyond its actual significance or influence. Members of the current administration call it the cradle of “cultural Marxism.” Olavo de Carvalho, the self-proclaimed philosopher who acts as the president’s intellectual guru, calls it “the vastest political organization ever to have existed in Latin America.”

Just this week, Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo said the Forum of São Paulo is using “violence, manipulation, crime, corruption, and fraud” to regain power.

9/O que querem hoje os saudosistas da PEI? Que voltemos a bajular os regimes totalitários e mandar-lhes dinheiro, ou pelo menos tolerá-los e não criar-lhes problema,...