Volume 40, Issue 1

The Chilean writer Miguel Serrano (1917–2009) is one of the most important figures of the contemporary right-wing counterculture, standing next to figures such as Julius Evola and Savitri Devi. Accordingly, in the last two decades his antisemitic books have been published in places as disparate as Idaho, Rome, Bogota, Melbourne, and London. Likewise, diverse musicians have paid tribute to him, revealing that his influence goes beyond conventional far-right circles. This paper shows the impact of Serrano’s antisemitism on the twenty-first-century countercultural rightists, emphasizing both the local aspects –Latin American, Chilean– of his “Esoteric Hitlerism” and the global dimension of such an impact. This study argues that Serrano was essentially a Chilean right-wing intellectual who, by means of a noteworthy narrative and an irreducible activism, created an antisemitic oeuvre able to attract from Latin America a heterogeneous set of actors. In other words, Serrano shaped a local antisemitic appeal whose effects can be traced on a global scale today. This challenges some notions on Latin America as a mere receptacle of foreign anti-Jewish trends.