“I already knew that he was very good on the issue, but that was seriously very good.”

Can you tell I haven’t slept much?

Hugo Chavez is the product of several trends, not the cause. These trends include:

1) A less-than-successful privatization and liberalization effort. It could have been worse, but for the most part rural dwellers have not benefited from free-market reforms, nor has there been an attempt to ensure that they legally have the property rights to what they own. Most of the privatization efforts were in goods and services provided to urban dwellers (electricity, utilities), in the tax rates (generally to the advantage of the very wealthy), and semi-privatization of resource markets which has led to public-private partnerships which have been less than ideal. Add to that corruption in the courts and law enforcement, and there is a perception that free markets benefit the wealthy, and screw the poor.

2) The drug war. The livelihoods of the rural poor are oftentimes dependent on working as farmers for coca or other plants seen as illicit by the US governments. Working in conjunction with the US and being pro-US in these countries usually means taking a hard line against drugs, per US policy: this, in turn, generally means destroying the livelihoods of these people, both figuratively and literally. The drug war has resulted in an expansion of law enforcement, military and intelligence in these countries to meet US objectives, and the US often trains with these groups to make them more efficient at what they do. Unfortunately, this is not paired with accountability: these institutions have oftentimes been a force unto themselves in Latin America; consequently, expanding their power is not considered to be a good thing in general. These are all phenomena directly associated with the federal war on drugs, and thus with the US, in these countries.

However, I’ll restate some points so that they will match with what you stated.

1) The reds can holler until the day is long about how horrible economic trends are for the poor; the only time they’re believed is when it approaches reality. After the 90s, right-wing parties and movements generally did very well in Latin American countries, and even left-wing parties were oftentimes forced to enact free-market reforms. Hernando De Soto is far from a leftist — he runs the premier free-market think tank in Latin America (the Institute for Liberty and Democracy) — and his bailiwick is writing about and advocating for property rights for the poor. Something happened between the early 90s and the early 00s to reverse trends towards the right in these nations, and I find De Soto’s explanation to be quite credible (since it is something which I got to experience when I lived in Panama). I love property rights and capitalism, but it’d be foolish to say that each and every reform towards that direction is going to be enormously successful. Most of the reforms in Latin American countries were at best, moderately successful. At worst, they tended to be something akin to the public-private partnerships which started the Tea Parties and OWS alike.

2) International treaties on drugs and US involvement in Latin America predate the Cold War. Venezuela was and is a major launch point for Colombian, Peruvian and cocaine in the region; due to this, pre-Chavez, the US funneled a lot of money into and was very supportive of the government and system in place. This did not do wonders for the American image: Hugo Chavez ran successfully against the rather corrupt incumbents quite successfully in ’98, and again in the early 2000s (the last elections in Venezuela with some amount of legitimacy), and these incumbents were linked (quite correctly) to the US. (Going back to point #1, one of the big issues was the less-than-successful market reforms of the early 90s.) You are right, though: the drug war issue in Venezuela was small potatoes compared to effects on rural voters in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, whose leftist demagogues ran on this issue in the mid-2000s through to the present. If you want to argue that the drug war is so wonderful that it justifies this sort of collateral damage, that’s your prerogative, but you can’t deny its effects on the politics of the region.

Either of these two trends is much more important than Hugo Chavez in terms of effects on politics in the entire region. Believe it or not, Chavez does not have the power, the reach, or even the unrivaled control over his country to dramatically shift the politics of the region. We’re not talking about the USSR, here.

The natural political tendencies of Latin Americans are endogenous factors; they’re not things that we or any government can change. Property rights and our drug policies? Now, those are factors within our control, and the control of the governments in the region.