Sergio Ramírez

Soon after making this discovery, Weld found that reactionary rulers were not the only ones to use the Spanish Civil War as their compass.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the Nicaraguan intellectual Sergio Ramirez wrote in his memoir about the Sandinista Revolution of 1979 that he and his comrades had inherited the lost dreams of the Spanish Republic passed down through generations.

Once you start looking for them, Weld told us, references to the Spanish Civil War appear everywhere.

From the writings of Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Roberto Bolaño, to the childhood memories of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, both of whom were trained in guerrilla warfare by Spanish exiles.

On the right, the old phalangist contention that liberal democracy was not the antithesis of communism, but the gateway to it, goes a long way in explaining the rise of postmodern codillos, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to Javier Millet in Argentina and José Antonio Kast in Chile.

As illiberal or neo-fascist regimes proliferate and endeavor to criminalize all forms of anti-fascist resistance, it has become commonplace to evoke a return of the 1930s.

Yet, as Kirsten Weld demonstrates, what we are witnessing, in and beyond Latin America, is less a resurgence of supposedly discarded ideologies after decades of dormancy than the surfacing and morphing of intellectual and political currents that never disappeared.

The enduring imprint of the Spanish Civil War in Latin America is exemplary in this regard.