The Ghost Of Simón Bolívar

Chávez's star appears to be getting dimmer as well. In the Mexican and Peruvian presidential elections of 2006, Felipe Calderón and Alan García defeated their closest rivals in part by portraying them as spendthrift Chávez clones who would lead those countries to the brink of bankruptcy. Opposition members of the Brazilian Senate later cited the authoritarian drift of the Chávez regime in blocking Venezuela's admission into South America's Mercosur trading bloc. Still more recently, authorities stopped a Venezuelan-American businessman at Buenos Aires's main international airport in August with a suitcase stuffed with nearly $800,000 in cash—allegedly from Chávez's associates and earmarked for the campaign of Argentina's future president Cristina Fernández.

His popular support is clearly waning, too. A 2006 Latinobarómetro survey of more than 20,000 people in 18 Latin American and Caribbean countries found that 39 percent of the respondents had a negative view of Chávez, comparable with U.S. President George W. Bush, one of the more reviled presidents in recent history. A Pew Global Attitudes survey released last June found that overwhelming majorities of Chileans, Brazilians, Peruvians and Mexicans had little or no faith in Chávez to "do the right thing" in the realm of world affairs. "Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez inspires little public confidence, even in Latin America," concluded the Pew survey. "He is widely recognized—and widely mistrusted."

Indeed, for all of his attempts to build regional institutions rooted in Caracas, there is little progress on construction. Only a handful of countries actively participate in the Telesur project, and many question whether the Bank of the South will function as a development-oriented financial institution or become another propaganda tool for Chávez's foreign policy. While the bank enjoys the official imprimatur of seven South American countries, Peru and Chile have joined Colombia in shunning it thus far and the lion's share of the financial institution's startup capital is expected to come from Venezuela and Brazil. The sixth summit of the ALBA trading-bloc alliance, scheduled to be held in Caracas in December, was postponed, but only two foreign chiefs of state—Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Ortega—had planned to attend. Their nations rank among the poorest in Central and South America. Meantime, governments in three of the fastest growing economies, Colombia, Peru and Panama, ignored the ALBA initiative and instead signed free-trade agreements with the United States.

Chávez's meddling in the politics of other countries has also angered neighbors and undercut his efforts to promote greater regional integration. Last week Chávez suffered a major embarrassment when he failed to obtain the release of three hostages held by guerrillas belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. His overheated rhetoric attracts headlines—he has called a number of world leaders devils, fascists and other choice words—but little respect. "Chávez has crossed the line on too many occasions recently, and he's run into a rough patch not just at home but also in the region," says Michael Shifter of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue policy-research group. "There are very few Latin American governments that will reject his largesse, but there hasn't been a great embrace of Chávez's regional projects."

If history is any guide, this rough patch is likely to continue. In December, Venezuelan voters rejected a change to the Constitution that would allow Chávez to stay on indefinitely. The Liberator had a similar interest in creating a lifetime presidency—and it, too, aroused intense opposition from political elites in the foreign countries he helped unshackle. His insistence on maintaining a unified Gran Colombia angered powerful players in Venezuela who eventually seceded from the union and barred Bolívar from returning to his homeland in the final year of his life. He died of tuberculosis, at 47, in lonely exile in the Colombian port of Santa Marta, soon after writing a letter to a former comrade-in-arms in which he enumerated the lessons he learned. First on the list: "America is ungovernable, for us." And despite Chávez's plans and rhetoric, it seems it will be equally so for him.

© 2008