The new alliances dedicated to destroying democracy

After staging a failed coup and going to prison, the Venezuelan army officer Hugo Chavez ran to be president in 1998, campaigning against corruption and offering revolutionary change. His nation was seen as a prosperous beacon of stability, built on its great oil wealth, envied by many people elsewhere in the region. He won by promising to tackle the inequality that scarred it so badly and take on the oligarchs enriching themselves through favours and nepotism. Western celebrities, journalists and politicians, from Sean Penn through to Jeremy Corbyn, started flocking to South America to hail their new progressive hero supposedly fighting for social justice.

One year after that election victory his police chief – who had planned that failed coup with him – came to warn his old friend that corruption was starting to corrode their new regime. Senior officials were taking kickbacks, he told the president, even on the printing of their proposed new constitution, while he had found evidence of a high-ranking military figure skimming cash from their flagship initiative to assist the poor. Chavez listened – then sacked his pal a few weeks later. Venezuela slid down the road to repression and ruin that led more than seven million of its citizens – one fifth of the population – to flee as the country fell apart.

As the historian and journalist Anne Applebaum writes in Autocracy, Inc, Chavez made a choice. No one forced him to turn Venezuela into a kleptocracy, stifle its freedoms or shatter its democratic institutions. Even his security chief, a long standing ally, was surprised. This decision to act like a parasitical mafia syndicate had nothing to do with culture or history, the standard excuses proffered by appeasers of dictatorship.