Hosts Alexander Scott and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli speak with Daniel Gunnar Kressel about his book Hispanic Technocracy: From Fascism to Catholic Authoritarianism in Spain, Argentina, and Chile, 1945–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Kressel argues that fascism did not simply die in 1945 but mutated, and that across Franco's Spain, Onganía's Argentina, and Pinochet's Chile a distinct post-fascist school of thought became state ideology, fusing Catholic spiritual mission, authoritarian rule, and early neoliberal economics. The conversation begins with Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora lecturing Chileans and Argentines in 1965 on a Spain that had supposedly left ideology behind for pure development, and why "bureaucratic authoritarianism" misses what these regimes were. Kressel traces the Hispanista networks that drew Argentine and Chilean rightists to Franco's Madrid in the 1950s as a third position against both Washington and Moscow; the rise of Opus Dei, whose ministers displaced the Falange, presided over the Spanish "economic miracle," and insisted they were realists without ideology; Onganía's ambition to be a Franco "in the most literal way"; and the ideological roots of Pinochet's terror and the subsidiary state that followed it. They close with the authoritarian nostalgia of Vox, José Antonio Kast, and Javier Milei, the corporatist model that never existed outside the regimes' own propaganda, and why Spain, Argentina, and Chile's democratic transitions came from the street, not from the technocrats.

Daniel Gunnar Kressel is a Koch History Centre Fellow at the University of Oxford (Wadham College) and a historian of modern Latin America and Spain whose work examines transnational right-wing ideologies, networks, and identities during the Cold War. He is the author of Hispanic Technocracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and José Antonio Primo de Rivera in Latin America: The Pursuit of a Fascist Usable Past during the Cold War (Routledge, 2025).

Get the book: Hispanic Technocracy: From Fascism to Catholic Authoritarianism in Spain, Argentina, and Chile, 1945–1991 is available now from Cambridge University Press: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/hispanic-technocracy/2C84722CD535BB901058E4748E10065B]

More from Daniel Kressel:

José Antonio Primo de Rivera in Latin America (Routledge, 2025) https://www.routledge.com/Jose-Antonio-Primo-de-Rivera-in-Latin-America-The-Pursuit-of-a-Fascist-Usable-Past-during-the-Cold-War-1939-1989/Kressel/p/book/9781032709796

Faculty page at Oxford: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-daniel-gunnar-kressel]

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