Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's headstrong decision to squander his moral capital in what became an increasingly ineffective populist-sponsored protest against Mexico’s last presidential election undermined his reputation. In spite of the enormous support he had mustered when he contested last year’s close election mano a mano, his support had since dwindled, while Felipe Calderon buttressed his conservative rule. Though no occupant of Los Pinos is likely to take on the United States in a directly confrontational way, Mexico has become used to regular post-September 11 brush offs by the Bush administration and can expect more of the same under President Calderуn. It is unlikely that the Bush administration’s guest workers program—affecting as many as eleven million undocumented workers in the United States—will solve the problem of illegal immigration. Therefore, the troubled border is likely to persist as a prime irritant between the United States and Mexico and can be expected to periodically invoke ringing populist outbursts from Mexico.

In Peru, former President Alan Garcia, much reviled when he left office in 1990, made an unexpected return to power last year. Though, as with the returned Sandinistas in Nicaragua, his once-venerable Aprista party has shed any genuinely populist associations, even a defanged APRA cannot fully sympathize with the road to prosperity pioneered by the Washington Consensus. However, Washington has tried to woo Lima, while Ollanta Humala’s populist movement—which espoused indigenous rights—has yet to achieve the successes of some of its more articulate counterparts elsewhere on the continent. Yet the movement has been further refining its socioeconomic credo and proposed administrative system, making it into a formidable rival of Garcia, particularly if the Garcia presidency stumbles.

Multipolarity: the “Pink Tide” and the Monroe Doctrine

Populism often causes Washington to distrust indigenous ideals and can turn race and culture into something of a shibboleth used to fan paranoia and a fear of change. Populism, in the eyes of the State Department and conservative Washington think tanks, has become a convenient, encapsulating slogan to depict Chбvez and Morales and their school as irresponsible radicals who would not make seemly diplomatic partners.

One of the key differences between the current face-off between the United States and a left-leaning segment of Latin American nations and how that relationship has been previously carried out is the absence of a Monroe Doctrine to invoke with respect to interventions by foreign powers in the hemisphere. Most recently, Soviet interest in the region, especially after the Cuban Revolution, gave US policymakers sufficient reason for Washington to play a hegemonic card. The force of this move was heightened by the irony that the Monroe Doctrine was first invoked against the Czarist Russia-led Holy Alliance, which had made rhetorical threats about re-conquering Spain's former Latin American colonies after the colonial era had ended. The post-Cold War era experienced echoes of the Monroe Doctrine but not any systematic use of it as a guiding principle for foreign policy.

With Venezuela seeking a multipolar alliance relationship with such declared or tacit opponents of the United States as Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia, the current situation is very much set for the invocation of a new and somewhat transformed round of populist-driven indictments of current US policy worldwide. Unlike Castro's Cuba, which needed Soviet logistical and financial support to guarantee its survival, Venezuela is not a beachhead requiring constant monitoring, but a large, wealthy country situated on the South American mainland and sitting astride immense reserves of oil and natural gas – the largest in the hemisphere. What is even more difficult for Washington is that the case against Chбvez cannot be made credibly, while that against the United States can. There is no dynamic of Chбvez being a puppet under the control of some extra-continental power. When he deals with China, Russia, or Iran, it is entirely on equal terms.

US policy initiatives directed against Chбvez cannot hide behind the purported altruism of the Monroe Doctrine to disguise what some observers see as Washington hankering after continued regional hegemony. The emergence of autochthonous leaders such as Kirchner, Morales, and Ecuador’s Correa, inspired to different degrees by Chбvez’s example and with unimpeachably legitimate democratic credentials of their own, renders somewhat implausible any attempt at a binary division of the hemisphere into black hats and white hats. We now see democratically elected regimes that have adopted traditional populism for the twenty-first century in a way that attracts the votes of the discontented but is also able to enact its ideological convictions in practical terms once in office. Populism has put the region back into global diplomatic play. Washington may now have to deal with more unrest than was ever expected in its own so-called backyard.