Last year, when José Antonio Kast was a presidential candidate, he gave special thanks for opening the doors to the Disenso Foundation, from the Spanish far-right party Vox led by Santiago Abascal. At the fourth edition of the Madrid Forum held in Asunción, organized by the entity itself, Kast stated that “many leaders who are now emerging in Latin America have much to thank the Disenso Foundation for, and I am one of them.” “One is glad when a Javier Milei thanks them and says ‘you opened the doors for me. You were the first.’ President Santiago Peña acknowledges the same,” he added. Vox has built a strong bridge to Latin America that today connects it with the governments of Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Paraguay. One of the questions is whether the Chilean president, as host, will sharpen that pencil in his inaugural speech at the V Madrid Forum, which will take place this Thursday in Santiago. His participation has generated criticism even from the local moderate right, but the president has defended it and said he hopes to be judged “by what happens and what I say at that event” and that “one can surprise people.”
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The ties between Vox and the Latin American ultra leaders tightened in 2020. Abascal created the Disenso Foundation, of which he is the lifelong patron – it does not require periodic reelection – and from there he promoted an anti-communist manifesto called the Madrid Charter. The document states that the “Iberosphere” has a part “kidnapped by totalitarian regimes of communist inspiration, supported by drug trafficking and third countries.” It holds the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group responsible, which it calls “criminal projects that have infiltrated centers of power and institutions” and calls on signatories to work jointly in defense of “Freedom, Democracy, and the Rule of Law.” Besides having the signatures of Kast, Milei, and Eduardo Bolsonaro – now joined by the president of Colombia, Abelardo de la Espriella – it is also supported by opponents of Chavismo María Corina Machado and Antonio Ledezma, among others.
Along with the charter, they created the Madrid Forum, whose launch had to be held online due to the pandemic. But since 2022, annual meetings have been held in Latin America (Bogotá, Lima, Buenos Aires, Asunción, and this Thursday Santiago). Abascal has said that the Madrid Forum will have a permanent structure and an annual action plan to “confront the advance of communism in the nations of the Iberosphere.” “Vox, through the Disenso Foundation, is not waiting for the future to arrive,” Kast said at a previous summit. “They are creating the future and making sure things happen. Because if everyone stays in their nation and no one communicates anything, we will all face the same while others organize,” he added.
In Spain, foundations linked to political parties have the right to receive a state subsidy based on the number of votes and deputies of their party. The Disenso Foundation received about 10.9 million euros between 2020 and 2024, with transfers from Vox reaching 2.5 million euros annually in 2021 and 2022 — almost 10 times what the PSOE contributes to its Pablo Iglesias foundation and 17 times what the Popular Party, of the traditional right, allocates to its own, Concordia y Libertad. In 2024, Abascal’s foundation received two million euros from the party founded by Abascal himself, in addition to 77,139 euros in subsidies from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture and 105,694 euros in private donations.
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The money made by the Disenso Foundation is mainly distributed in two items: about one million euros a year for its digital newsletter, La Gaceta de la Iberosfera (961,089 euros in 2024 and 1,310,572 in 2023), and more than 702,943 euros in “independent professional services,” including 133,725 euros for “consulting,” without the accounts revealing the identity of those receiving these payments. Despite its income, the entity recorded losses of 373,861 euros in 2024. Until then, the foundation had closed all its fiscal years with a surplus, with a maximum of 376,945 euros in 2021.
One of Kast’s last meetings with Abascal was last February, at the European Parliament in Brussels, just days before he took office at La Moneda. They participated in the VII Transatlantic Summit, organized by Political Network for Values (PNV [Political Network for Values], an ultraconservative organization that Kast led between 2022 and 2024). It was an occasion when the founder of the Chilean Republican Party called to promote “family, truth, and freedom” against the “isms” of the left. “Today we experience the fruits of a culture dominated by isms (…): extreme environmentalism that prioritizes nature over the human being, radical animalism that places animals above human dignity, ideological feminism that pits men and women against each other instead of dignifying them equally, radical indigenism that replaces integration,” he said.
For this new edition of the Madrid Forum, however, Abascal will not be able to attend. President Kast reported this during an interview on Cooperativa radio, explaining that on that Thursday, when the meeting starts in Santiago, a plenary session of the Spanish Parliament was convened.
