It's the U.S. heritage in Latin America that made Hugo Chavez work this way

[Ken Burch]

If you claim to be progressive and also anti-Chavez, you need to acknowledge this. Our history in Latin America is one of constant hostility towards anyone who worked for any meaningful social change within the bounds of "representative democracy".

Our country usually overthrew the governments that tried to do that(as we did in Chile, and as we may indirectly have just done in Honduras)or we tried to drive countries that were attempting to have radical, yet democratic change towards less democratic methods through constant economic and military pressure(Nicaragua in the Eighties being the most recent example), or we simply made Latin American democrats abandon the poor and the workers(as we did with Lula and with Alan Garcia in Peru).

This left either the police state approach that the Cuban Revolution fell into by default or the modified semi-authoritarian left-caudillismo, that Chavez is employing as just about the only models that existed for leftists in Latin America who actually wanted to achieve any change beyond trivial incremental window dressing.

If you don't like that, you need to be working for a totally non-interventionist U.S. policy in Latin America. And this is an admistration that could be persuaded to implement such a policy.

That's what you SHOULD be doing. Not starting endless "Chavez is a dictator" threads.