Glimpsing a Democratic Venezuela After Chavez: Enrique Krauze

Every Latin American country has fostered, to some degree, a “Cult of the Hero,” but only Venezuela has raised its founding father, Simon Bolivar, to the extreme of deification.

Shortly after Bolivar’s death in 1830, veneration for him among Venezuelans became a kind of historical sacrament. The particular ingenuity of Hugo Chavez was to mythically identify his revolutionary movement with the person of Bolivar, and to make millions of his countrymen believe that he is the reincarnation of the great liberator who freed Latin America from the domination of Spain. (Fidel Castro had done something similar in Cuba, appropriating the memory of the hero Jose Marti.) Embodied in Chavez, Bolivar was supposed to have returned to free Venezuela and Latin America from Yankee imperialism, depicted as more merciless than its Spanish predecessor.