Peter Krupa

The following is a little piece I dashed off for a foreign policy newsletter. It traces the tough times Hugo Chavez has been having recently in Latin America. The editors made a few significant changes to my piece, so I thought I’d post this - the original version - for the sake of posterity.

At the beginning of 2006, Hugo Chavez was riding high in Latin America.

In 2004, he had defeated a recall referendum, and in 2005, at the Summit of the Americas in Mar de Plata, Argentina, he had delivered a rock-star-like performance on a side stage that had overshadowed the main event. Later in 2005, Venezuela had been approved for full membership in the Southern Common Trade Group (Mercosur), and oil prices were on their way to $60 a barrel. By the end of that year, Chavez’ good friend and ideological soul mate, Evo Morales, had been elected president of Bolivia by a comfortable margin, and with populist leftist candidates making strong showings in 2006 presidential races in Chile, Peru, and Mexico, Chavez’ Bolivarian Revolution seemed poised to make a clean sweep of the entire region.

But the heights to which he soared at the beginning of 2006 would turn out to be the peak for Chavez.

First, level-headed Chile shrugged off the rising populist tide by sending a conservative and a center-left candidate to the run-offs. Then, in Peru’s hotly-contested presidential run-off between corrupt ex-president Alan García and former soldier and populist rabble-rouser Ollanta Humala, Peruvians reacted strongly against the idea of Chavez meddling in their politics, and association with Chavez actually became a negative. Humala quickly tried to distance himself from his roll model, but it was too late - García beat him out by a slim margin, and suddenly, Chavez’ political capital in the region was down to the dredges.

Since then, Chavez has been in full retreat. In April, in an desperate attempt to regain some clout in the Andean region and force some support for his anti-free trade policies, he withdrew from the Andean Community of Nations, a trade bloc to which Venezuela had been a member since 1973, then offered to rejoin on the condition that Peru drop its free trade agreement with the United States. Peru, however, refused, and Venezuela went on to form a new trade group with Bolivia and Cuba.

Chavez has experienced several other smaller-scale setbacks throughout the year in his plans to unify the region, Bolivia’s much-hyped nationalization of its natural gas resources being one of them. When the military swept in to seize control of the country’s natural gas fields this spring, the elephant in the living room was that the largest stake in those fields was owned by Brazil’s state energy company, Petrobras. While Venezuelan engineers loudly and publicly stepped up to help Morales with the take-over, Brazil stood angrily on the sidelines watching more than $1 billion in investment simply being snatched away by its erstwhile friends.

The final nail in the coffin for Chavez’ dreams of regional unity with himself at the helm was the defeat of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico’s presidential election. By then, association with Chavez had become something of a scarlet letter, and Felipe Calderón, recognizing this, ran an effective smear campaign painting Obrador as a chavista lapdog. It worked, though just barely, and now as 2006 begins to draw toward its conclusion, the Bolivarian Revolution finds itself still swimming in oil, but increasingly alone, with no new converts since Bolivia and a dying ally in Cuba to boot.

Chavez can still be a threat to stability in Latin America, but 2006 has been a rough year, and his plans for regional leadership are all but spoiled. Certain allies like Brazil and Argentina will continue to court Chavez’ favor, but for canny economical reasons, not pie-in-the-sky ideological ones. Indeed, Chavez seems to have realized this, and so in one of the capricious and erratic changes of policy that have come to typify his leadership style, he seems for the moment to have turned his back on regional relationships in favor of jet-setting around the world to make ties with governments of the most dubious nature – Belarus, Iran, Syria, and China, to name a few.

Likely this also has something to do with Venezuela’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council, but who can say for sure what Chavez has in mind. Odds are, even he doesn’t know yet.