"They say there's Castro-style communism here, but the government hasn't taken anything away from anyone," Sigilfredo Tineo, 61, said last Sunday, when like-minded voters gave Venezuela's president another six years in office. "On the contrary, it's delivering houses, credits, vehicles to people. There's more liberty and equality than ever," said Tineo, an electricity company worker who received a $1,800 low-interest government loan to help buy a car.
It's easy to find Venezuelans like Tineo who have benefited from Chavez's efforts to more equitably distribute the nation's oil wealth. While Chavez opponents complain they can't get government jobs or contracts, millions of Venezuelans now enjoy subsidized food, free health care and education, and low-interest loans to get businesses kickstarted. Malnourished, landless Indians clamoring for a greater share of their nations' oil and natural gas riches helped propel Correa to power in Ecuador on Nov.
26 and a year ago elected Bolivia's champion of the excluded, Evo Morales, as president. One in four Latin Americans live on less than $2 a day. That helps explain the new heft of the region's political left -- not just in Argentina, Chile or Brazil, where social democrats hold the presidency, but also in Peru, Mexico and Colombia, where the left lost presidential races but proved itself a formidable force.
Latin America has the world's most unequal distribution of wealth outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Its richest 10 percent earns 48 percent of total income, while the poorest earns just 1.6 percent, according to the World Bank.
In the 1980s and 90s, most Latin American leaders heartily embraced a U.S.-advocated push for privatization of state industries and a lifting of trade barriers.
But per capita gross domestic product in Latin America and the Caribbean declined by 0.7 percent during the 1980s and grew by just 1.5 percent annually in the 1990s, the World Bank says.
There was no significant decrease in poverty levels. Now the legions of the poor have registered their displeasure, electing the likes of Chavez and Morales. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto calls the two anti-market, anti-capitalist charismatic leaders who are filling a power vacuum and benefiting from the unpopularity of President Bush's administration with their anti-American rhetoric.
"The mistake, from my point of view, is trying to figure out Chavez. What you've got to figure out is why the market economic model has not worked to include the majority from Mexico down to Tierra del Fuego," he said. The great challenge for any leader is spurring job growth.
Venezuela's official unemployment rate is nearly 9 percent -- just two percentage points lower than in 1998, when Chavez was first elected, despite a booming economy. "There is no great industrial growth, nor great growth in investment," in large part because the private sector fears onerous regulation and nationalization, said Venezuelan economist Luis Vicente Leon. Chavez told adoring crowds last week that "socialism is love" and promised to take it further.
How he'll do that isn't clear. Although his government has seized significant tracts of ranch land that it determined to be inadequately exploited, something Morales has also decided to do, Chavez frequently tells his countrymen he has complete respect for private property. Leon, a critic of Chavez, acknowledges that when the government has seized such private holdings as fallow farmland or failed factories, it has paid market price or better.
"So," Leon wonders, "what kind of leftist revolution is this?
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