Hugo Chávez Legacy: A Wedge between U.S., Latin America

Venezuela President Hugo Chávez, who died Tuesday, made it his mission to sway Latin American leaders away from the US and toward his brand of populist socialism. Chavez made strides, but his influence in the region had been waning.

In December 1994, Miami and the Clinton administration hosted the first Summit of the Americas, an event that drew the leaders of every country from Canada to Chile but Cuba. It was perhaps the zenith of the quest to cast the Western Hemisphere in Washington’s image, with a vast, Arctic-to-Tierra-del-Fuego free-trade area among market economies that banished populism and ostracized Cuba as the lone vestige of a bygone socialism.

Enter Hugo Chávez, a red-bereted, self-described Bolivarean revolutionary – after the George Washington of South America, Simón Bolívar – preaching a very different vision to a struggling but oil-rich Venezuela. Mr. Chávez’s model of socialist populism struck a chord that reverberated well beyond Venezuela – and that sounded the death knell of the thinking, more than a century old, that Latin America had no option but to follow Washington’s lead.

Chávez died Tuesday after a long illness that, in recent months, silenced the usually vituperative, blustery, even outrageous leader. He leaves a Latin America much changed from the one he encountered when he first took office as Venezuela's president in 1999….

“I don’t think it can be overstated how he fundamentally changed relations not just between the US and Venezuela, but how he did the same with US-Latin America relations,” says Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas and the Americas Society in Washington. “Chávez put meat on the bones of the basic message he spread, which was that there is an alternative for development, [and] you don’t have to follow the example and dictates of the United States….”

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