In July 2011, a young far-right Norwegian, Anders Breivik, exploded a bomb in a Labor Party camp in Utoya, killing 77 people. In 2018, an anti-Semitic attack at the Pittsburgh synagogue left 11 dead. In March 2019, another young Australian, Brenton Tarrant, attacked two mosques in New Zealand, causing 51 victims. In the middle of that year, a white supremacist murdered 23 people in Texas. In February 2020, a German far-right killed nine people in two bars frequented by foreigners in the city of Hanau, near Frankfurt.
By 2021, the year of the assault on the Capitol, the US FBI estimated that 70 percent of the attacks that occurred in that country had a white supremacist root. In 2022, in Buffalo, in that country, a young white far-right gunman murdered ten people in a supermarket, most of them black. The cases are very different from each other, and happened in different geographies, but they have something in common: the hatred of those who are different and the conviction that such a minority is to blame for the decadence in which we live, feelings that are pushed by politicians and intellectuals who are part of that current that was called the new right and that today governs different latitudes.
The list of hate crimes that swept the world is much longer than what could be included in this note. Sadly, in this region a new chapter has just been added to that list. And it’s one that hit hard in several ways.
The Uruguayan Pablo Luarta is accused of committing two brutal femicides, of his ex-partner and her mother, and that of a taxi driver. The images of the Urugayan being detained in Entre Ríos, when he was about to finish his macabre plan that included the kidnapping of his youngest son and the escape of both to their native country, spread throughout the region. But that’s not the only reason the case had such an impact: after the crimes, photos of the creator of “Varones Unidos” began to circulate, a group that had feminism as its declared enemy, along with Javier Milei’s two favorite intellectuals, Agustín Laje and Nicolás Márquez. As if that were not enough, photos also appeared of Luarta sharing an event with Nicolás Quintana, the creator, with official endorsement, of La Libertad Avanza in Uruguay.
Crime
“They will soon receive what they deserve.” That was a response from Luarta to an anti-feminist post on the networks, at the end of July. There are many more along those lines: “There is no future for a society where women have a higher status than men”, “the best thing about 8M is that it reminds us how blatantly liars some women are”, “a woman’s worst enemy is herself”.
They were not isolated statements. “Varones Unidos”, the group he created, had as its leitmotiv to install the idea that men suffered discrimination due to “false complaints” and the power of women. That is one of the flagship theses of the logic of the “cultural battle”, a logic that has as its zero point the idea that communism lost the Cold War but triumphed and colonized areas such as culture, the media, education or even the functioning of Justice. Luarta claimed to be a victim of the latter: she maintained in her space that her ex-partner had taken her son from her because of a system co-opted by feminism. “It was for Justice,” he said, already in custody, when journalists asked him about the crime as he left a courthouse handcuffed.
This battle against “cultural Marxism” – a war in which Luarta also pointed out in statements and posts against Islam and immigration, topics not at all relevant in Uruguayan public discussion but which are central to this ideology – was not fought alone. So much so that, sponsored by former conservative deputy Rodrigo Goñi, in 2018 he brought Laje and Márquez to Uruguay. There he was part of the presentation of the authors’ bestseller, “The Black Book of the New Left.” The images of Luarta at that event, in the car with the authors, and sharing a lunch with them, immediately spread throughout the region. A video of the two of them congratulating “Varones Unidos” – “big hug, continue with this crusade against gender ideology,” says Laje – also went viral.
Milei’s favorite intellectuals were heavily targeted after the Luarta crimes. Not only because of the bond, but because of the ideology that the three share. “Every bullet for a left-handed person is a reason for celebration,” “Lucio (Dupuy, the boy murdered by his mother and her partner) was a victim of gender ideology,” “the left is not our adversary, it is our enemy,” are some of Laje’s statements. “Homosexuals are sodomites, perverts and abnormals,” said Márquez.
The two made extensive posts separating themselves from the alleged murderer, where they clarified that they only saw him on that occasion and that they in no way agree with what happened. With Márquez the situation has a different tenor: he was denounced by his ex-partner for sexual abuse against his daughter, a case in which he was acquitted by Justice.
However, the underlying questions remain: is it a coincidence that someone who declares feminism as the great enemy of the world ends up becoming a femicide? Is hate speech just speech? Or, as all sociologists and linguists have studied since Pierre Bordieu until now, does what is said condition reality?
Attacks
In all of 2023, 133 hate crimes occurred, according to the National LGBT+ Hate Crimes Observatory. The data is more than worrying when contrasted with today: according to that same organization, 102 hate crimes occurred in the first half of 2025 alone. Although it is not linear, if the year continues like this it would end with almost double the number of hate crimes compared to 2023. Is it a coincidence that this happens under the mandate of Javier Milei? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the highest authority in the country constantly invites us to “hate more,” to be “more cruel,” to blame all evils on the “left-handed sons of bitches who are sick in their souls,” to dehumanize anyone who thinks differently from “a cockroach, a rat, a virus, a Lilliputian, a baboon,” or maintain that homosexuality leads to pedophilia? Could this growing hatred, which quickly goes from the symbolic to the real, be driven by the fact that the politicians and intellectuals who surround the President think the same or are even more extreme?
José Benegas, author of several books on the subject – among them “The Unthinkable, the Curious Case of Liberals Mutating Fascism”, published in 2020 – thinks so. “What happened to Laurta is not an isolated case. The ‘cultural battle’ creates the symbolic climate in which these subjects feel legitimized. At the same time, it shifts attention to supposed demons – ‘gender ideology’, trans people – and places those who denounce them under suspicion, instead of the aggressors. At the same time, these movements bring together a mass of repressed people who feel protected by identifying with the aggressor: instead of rebelling against the authority that dominates them, they merge with it and believe they gain dignity under its shadow. This massive identification with the aggressor is what makes the cultural battle an effective device for reproducing violence,” he says.
“By locating the source of the crises in the misappropriation of resources by various ‘others’ (countries, religions, cultures, sexualities) and by framing the distributive conflict as a war against them, the new right makes the persecution of the weakest justifiable and neutralizes the psychological burden generated by the excesses that may be committed,” maintains Brazilian Rodrigo Nunes in his book “Bolsonarism and the global extreme right.” If all this is true, hate crimes can only grow.l
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