Hugo Go Home

Duncan Currie takes a few whacks at Hugo Chavez's claims of international influence.

Chávez may be a throwback to the old South American caudillos, who blended populism, authoritarianism, and military rule. But even his two supposed protégés, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, are hardly carbon copies. In Nicaragua, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega regained power with less than 40 percent of the vote, thanks to election rules that make it possible for a candidate to win the presidency with just 35 percent. But a majority of Nicaraguans voted for one of the two center-right candidates. Thus far, Ortega has accepted the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

Talk of a populist surge in the region contains some truth. But Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua are three of Latin America's weakest, poorest countries, never fully integrated into the global economy. As Christopher Sabatini, senior policy director at the Americas Society and editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, points out, the elections of Morales and Correa were based less on ideology than on practical grievances. And Ortega's victory was certainly "not a triumph of leftism," but rather "a triumph of electoral manipulation."

My first reason web column was about Chavez and how his chest-pounding elevated a left-wing candidate into the second round of Peru's presidential election… and how it backfired and kept that candidate from defeating basically discredited ex-president Alan Garcia in a run-off. (Garcia was the failed predecessor of Alberto Fujimori. Imagine if in 1988 the GOP nominated Richard Nixon and you get an idea of how weird this comeback was.) More recently Michael C. Moynihan criticized Chavez's Western enablers… but I remain more interested in the impression that Chavez is a gathering threat to American national security. He's got an inflated sense of his own popularity and reach.