The Ghost Of Simón Bolívar

Nearly 200 years ago Venezuelan patriot Simón Bolívar declared his country a free and sovereign state, and went on to liberate four other South American nations from Spanish colonial rule, envisioning a confederation of Andean republics that would stretch from the isthmus of Panama to the high plateau country of Bolivia. His dream inspired another, decades later, when a young Hugo Chávez, then an Army officer in his late 20s, gathered with some of his military colleagues in the Venezuelan city of Maracay on the anniversary of Bolívar's death and declared, "There is Bolívar in the sky of the Americas, watchful and frowning ... because what he left undone remains undone to this very day."

Chávez has attempted to finish the job ever since. Already "the most influential head of state in Latin America," according to a critical biography by Venezuelan writers Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka, his guiding star has always been Bolívar, who at the apex of his career exerted an influence that went far beyond the borders of his native land. Bolívar, in 1819, merged Venezuela with Colombia and Ecuador to found the Republic of Gran Colombia. He was subsequently appointed chief of state in the newly independent nations of Peru and Bolivia, and believed Venezuela would carry more heft as part of a larger entity than it could ever hope to acquire on its own. "Only a Venezuela united with New Granada [Colombia] could form a nation that would inspire in others the proper consideration due to her," he argued in 1813.

Chávez also renamed his native country—the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela—in one of his first acts after his Inauguration in 1999. And he too has attempted to transform the nation into a powerful regional player that would serve as a counterweight to the hegemony of a foreign power, the United States. His goal, according to a recent government document, is the "consolidation" of a left-wing alliance that encompasses Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia and the strengthening of "alternative movements in Central America and Mexico" to distance them from Yankee "domination."

To achieve it he has mixed oil revenue and economic and political meddling with his neighbors with strident anti-U.S. rhetoric, much like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin have done in Iran and Russia. In the first eight months of 2007, Chávez pledged an estimated $8.8 billion in financing, aid and energy funding to more than a dozen countries in the hemisphere. But uniquely, he has also attempted to create a slew of institutions and organizations including a 24-hour news channel, Telesur, that aspires to combat what its handpicked chief calls "cultural imperialism"; a regional development bank, the Bank of the South, that will offer credit to countries on easier terms than those provided by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and a trading bloc called the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) that he hoped would neutralize Washington's ongoing efforts to negotiate a hemispheric free-trade treaty.

Like his hero, Chávez has also become a force in the politics of other nations. In the run-up to the 2006 presidential election in Nicaragua, Caracas signed a deal with an association of Sandinista mayors to provide up to 10 million barrels of Venezuelan oil on preferential terms. Voters rewarded their candidate for president, Daniel Ortega, with a victory at the polls later that year. He has made similar appeals to the people of Bolivia and Ecuador, firming up support from their presidents, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa. In October, Chávez urged Cuba's acting President Raúl Castro to link their two countries' fortunes more closely. "Cuba and Venezuela could perfectly form a confederation of nations in the near future," he said during a visit to Havana, channeling Bolívar's vision, if not his words. "Two countries in one."

Yet Bolívar never succeeded. Despite his attempt at drawing Latin America together, he believed he never truly had the support of enormous swaths of the population. "I shall always be a foreigner to Peruvian people and I shall always arouse the jealousy and distrust of these gentlemen," Bolívar observed in a September 1823 missive to his Colombian vice president, according to a biography by British historian John Lynch. "We will always be guilty simply by our birth: whites and Venezuelans," he complained six years later in a dispatch from Ecuador. "We can never rule in these regions."