In early September, senators from Mexico’s National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) gave a very public welcome to a very particular guest: Santiago Abascal, president of the Spanish neofascist party Vox.

The occasion of the meeting, held in nothing less than the Senate building itself, was to sign the Madrid Letter: a sort of Cold War–throwback manifesto committing the parties to liberate Latin America from the “Communist-inspired totalitarian regimes” that, the letter claims, are disseminating their “criminal and ideological project” across the region in a nefarious attempt to subvert liberal democracies and the rule of law.

Blowback from the visit was immediate and fierce, so much so that senators who were happily taking their picture with Abascal one day spent the next frantically trying to distance themselves from their own event. After initially denying that any of its members had attended at all, the PRI changed its tune to insist that anyone who happened to have been there went of their own accord.