For several days, Spanish and Mexican media were dominated by the visit of the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel D\u00edaz Ayuso, representative of the most conservative wing of Spain\u2019s Popular Party (PP), to Mexico and the ensuing spectacle of actions and reactions involving the local government. The debates it sparked seemed to place the reader-viewer before the need to line up behind either Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum or Ayuso, almost as if it were a neighborhood football club match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That visceral polarization risks obscuring the structural dimension underlying the diplomatic incident: the consolidation of a transnational ultraconservative network. And, particularly relevant for the Latin American reader, a contradiction that this movement would rather keep concealed: \u201cHispanidad\u201d as a banner and borders as practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The visit did not emerge out of nowhere. Ayuso belongs to a specific ecosystem. Since 2020, a formal architecture of transnational ultraconservative coordination has been taking shape on both sides of the Atlantic. The Madrid Forum<\/a>, founded by the Spanish far-right party Vox, defines itself as a permanent \u201cinternational organization,\u201d explicitly designed as a conservative counterweight to the S\u00e3o Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group. The tension is real: three weeks before Ayuso\u2019s trip, Sheinbaum, Lula, Petro, and S\u00e1nchez, among others, gathered in Barcelona for the IV Summit \u201cIn Defense of Democracy.\u201d Two transnational networks, two agendas, one global ideological battle. Ayuso\u2019s trip to Mexico is just another node in that circuit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, Ayuso did not meet with President Sheinbaum, nor with Congress, nor with the Head of Government of Mexico City. She met with the mayor of Cuauht\u00e9moc, the governor of Aguascalientes, and leaders of the National Action Party (PAN), with no high-level meeting on the agenda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The language is equally revealing, to the point of reviving the archaic spelling \u201cM\u00e9jico\u201d in her communications. Ayuso praised Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s, celebrated the conquest as a civilizing mission, and described the relationship between Spain and Hispanic America as \u201cfive centuries of love.<\/a>\u201d These are not diplomatic blunders, but the deliberate vocabulary of a transnational political identity that constructs its enemy\u2014the communist narco-state\u2014while also contesting the past: mestizaje as a \u201cmessage of hope and joy,\u201d and its critics as \u201cidiots\u201d and enemies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the trip was interrupted, the third element was predictable: the narrative of persecution. Ayuso accused Sheinbaum\u2019s government of \u201cboycotting\u201d her visit, orchestrating a \u201ctotalitarian drift,\u201d and later, of failing to receive protection from the Spanish government. Categorically denied by the Xcaret Group, the martyrdom narrative collapsed empirically, but it had already fulfilled its function: days of international coverage, a villain, and a heroine who \u201cstood up to the left.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This playbook is neither exclusive to Ayuso nor a Spanish invention. Milei executed it with inverse precision: he traveled to Madrid, declined to meet with S\u00e1nchez, surrounded himself with Vox and PP leaders, used the same political grammar\u2014\u201csocialism,\u201d \u201cdecadence,\u201d \u201cdestruction of freedom\u201d\u2014and reaped the expected coverage and scandal. The mirror image is almost perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe three keys to the visit<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The playbook and its operators<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n