“Weapons of Mass Instruction”: Eduardo Verástegui, Sound of Freedom (2023), and The New Right In Mexico

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of a small but growing network of Latin American filmmakers, production companies, and streaming platforms aligned with the new far-right movements gaining power in the region. This article considers the case of Sound of Freedom (2023), a sex-trafficking thriller directed by Alejandro Monteverde and produced by the Mexican far-right activist Eduardo Verástegui. A US production filmed in Colombia and promoted by world leaders including Donald Trump, Javier Milei, and Giorgia Meloni, Sound of Freedom allows us to trace the cinematic rise of Verástegui’s Movimiento Viva México (MVM) and consider new-right cultural production from a transnational perspective. Verástegui and other public figures have used Sound of Freedom to platform anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigration, and “anti-woke” politics, despite the film’s lack of direct engagement with these issues. Examining the film’s circulation within anti-trans and pro-life groups, militias stationed at the US-Mexico border, and various segments of the New Religious Right in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States, I argue that the praxis of counterculture enacted through new-right cinema is best understood as a “resonance machine”, in which the intensification of latent sensibilities enables seemingly unrelated elements to echo and amplify one another.