Washington Shouldn't Sweat Latin Leftists

Ted Galen Carpenter

Politics, Americas

The days of Bolivarian populism in South America are over.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, officials in the United States and other hemispheric countries with moderate or conservative governments have been troubled by the surge of support for so-called Bolivarian populism. In retrospect, the triumph of Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution in 1979 may have been the first major manifestation of that trend. But the defeat of President Daniel Ortega in the 1990 elections (and the willingness of the Sandinistas to accept that electoral rebuke) suggested that the initial leftist victory did not signal a trend. Indeed, the 1980s and 1990s seemed to epitomize the growing strength of neoliberal or conservative political forces in Latin America.

The election of Venezuela’s populist champion Hugo Chávez in 1999, however, heralded the emergence of a countertrend. That became even more apparent in the years that followed, when new, radical leaders took office in Ecuador and Bolivia, and Ortega returned to power in Nicaragua with a new electoral mandate in 2007. Chávez and his allies quickly became a thorn in the side of the United States. U.S. officials began to fear that a Bolivarian populist revolution might sweep Latin America.

Washington’s worries have been directed against three aspects of the populist regimes. First, those governments tend to engage in shrill anti-U.S. rhetoric reminiscent of the Sandinistas in the 1980s and, to some extent, even Fidel Castro’s communist regime throughout the Cold War. Chávez’s insulting mockery of President George W. Bush during a September 2006 speech to the UN General Assembly was a relatively mild version of the comments coming from Caracas and other Bolivarian capitals. Beyond engaging in verbal bashing of the United States, Chávez and his allies were openly hostile to Washington’s political and economic values and objectives.

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