By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
 

CARACAS, Venezuela, April 12 -- Colombia's guerrillas decorated their former jungle haven with images of their heroes.
There was the oil painting of their wrinkled leader Manuel Marulanda, still waging war after four decades, and posters of the
graying revolutionary Fidel Castro.

After the 1998 election in this country, however, a new face began appearing in the guerrillas' pantheon: that of Hugo Chavez.
In fatigues and a paratrooper's red beret, the new president was superimposed between the guerrilla heroes of old -- the face
of a new generation of leftist Latin American leaders ready to antagonize the United States.

Now Colombia's government-sanctioned guerrilla haven is gone. So is Chavez after three tumultuous years of leftist agitating,
class warfare and a spasm of violence on the streets of this capital, suggesting that leftist revolutions waged even by elected
leaders are not the choice of a region still highly susceptible to populist appeals. Or at least not the way Chavez carries out
revolutions.

"The lesson here is that charismatic demagogues can still win elections in poor countries," said Anibal Romero, a political
science professor at Simon Bolivar University here. "The economic and social instability is still with us. The field is still open for
the successful appearance of these figures that, by distorting reality and securing the hearts and minds of the uneducated,win
elections."

Chavez's legacy is a bleak one for Latin America's radical left, now pushing against the prevailing political current of free trade,
capitalism and a general nod to U.S. interests.

Chavez resisted each of those forces, instead mixing populism and Marxism to appeal to the four of every five Venezuelans
living in poverty in a country with the largest oil reserves outside the Persian Gulf. His resignation today ended a self-declared
"social revolution" that he hoped would extend beyond Venezuela's borders, and outside Latin America.

Almost immediately, Chavez's opponents set about reversing some of his proudest policy decisions. An official at the state oil
company said today that "Cuba would not get one more drop of Venezuelan oil," voiding an agreement to sell cut-rate oil that
Chavez struck with Castro. A decree passed by the interim government declared Colombia's Marxist insurgency
"narco-guerrillas," clarifying the country's position after Chavez failed to do so.

With the collapse of peace talks in Colombia two months ago, the United Stateshad asked Chavez to declare his support for
the U.S.-backed Colombian government in its war with the guerrillas. But he refused, even though the majority of his own
constituency does not support the Colombian rebels, who have increasingly spilled across Venezuela's borders as the war
intensifies.

The emerging response to Chavez's forced resignation, which he tendered to three generals this morning, highlights how fragile
democracy is in an Andean region that has had three presidents ousted by coup or popular protest in the last three years. U.S.
officials declined today to call Chavez's removal a coup, even as the leaders from 19 Latin American nations condemned "the
constitutional interruption" in Venezuela.

Part of the problem is the way people such as Chavez, who had been on the outside of a corrupt two-party lock on power for
years, play the game once they take office. After his failed 1992 coup, Chavez served a two-year prison sentence and then
began a journey of discovery on horseback across Venezuela's countryside. He was accompanied by an Argentine neo-fascist,
Norberto Ceresole, who believed that a leader should rule with the army at his side.

After his election, Chavez set out to weaken Venezuela's institutions, first by engineering a new constitution that bolstered his
power and then by appointing loyal military officers to run its independent agencies. Chavez set out to run a country with a
sophisticated economy, based primarily on its vast oil reserves, as a one-man show. He employed the military to carry out
social projects, and passed by fiat such important legislation as a land reform measure that would confiscate private property.

But to many Venezuelans, even those who supported him in two elections, the Bolivarian Revolution -- named for the early
19th-century Caracas-born independence hero Simon Bolivar -- was more show than substance and his embrace of Castro's
Cuba cost him dearly at home. Corruption crept into the military's social outreach program, and Chavez picked fights with the
private institutions that stood between him and his constituency. The media, labor unions and the Catholic Church made his
enemies' list.

Everything about the short-lived Chavez era evoked a time from Latin America's distant past that the former army colonel still
subscribed to -- the red berets and military fatigues, the arm-waving speeches that lasted for hours, grating on his followers as
well as his critics.

Chavez favored an ideology he called "Bolivarianism," after the man who liberated much of South America from Spanish rule.
Although never clearly defined, the doctrine came to mean a resistance to pressures, especially from the United States, in a
region where anti-imperialist sentiments still run high. He talked about forming a South American army, and his contacts with
dissident groups in Bolivia and El Salvador raised worries among other Latin American leaders.

In the end, Romero said, Chavez showed what was wrong with a U.S. policy that endorses democratic government regardless
of how it is carried out. Democracies operate differently in each country, Romero said, and should be treated differently as a
result.

"It is a great improvement that the U.S. is committed to democracy and the rule of law in Latin America, and it's a big change
from the past," Romero said. "But this is not a policy that should be implemented indiscriminately. Legality is one thing,
legitimacy is another."

                                 © 2002