Se analyze the relationship between populism, religion and politics, both on a theoretical level and in the cases of Brazil and Mexico. It begins with a critique of Joanildo Burity's article on "the Pentecostal people" in Brazil and the relevance of using Laclau's theory of populism to explain this phenomenon. The same arguments are then used to analyze, as a contrast, contemporary Mexican populism, embodied in President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, highlighting its religious background.

WThe author develops three specific observations on the religious practices introduced by Pentecostalism in the global balance of inequalities in Latin America with the attempt to point out the complexity and ambiguity of their social performances according to dimensions and contexts of analysis. These are: the ups and downs of Catholicism in the region; the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America; and the characteristics of the implantation of Pentecostalism in the popular sectors and the discussion of its value regarding the reproduction of all kinds of inequalities in contemporary Latin American societies.

The consolidation of conservative projects supported by political and religious actors in Latin America is not a novelty: the continent has seen advances and crises of popular governments, bloody dictatorships, violent speeches and rights expansion processes that are carried out with different intensity and decoupled temporalities in different countries. The ways of naming this trend are the subject of discussion in this section, since the naming itself is a problem: they are expressions made up of diverse sectors socially and even politically, claiming transformations of varying thickness as the context allows them. Based on these ideas, we organized our discussion around three questions, which the authors answered based on the experience of each country.