#5 Hugo Chavez
Speech fodder. Whether he was comparing him to Satan or calling him a donkey, nothing livened up a Chávez speech or an episode of his TV show Alo Presidente like an extended tirade against George W. Bush. After a botched coup attempt against him in 2002, Chávez routinely accused domestic political opponents of being part of a U.S.-backed coup to overthrow him. His main foreign-policy project, the ALBA economic union, was marketed to other Latin American countries as a way to counteract U.S. influence. Chávez’s bombastic anti-Bush statments earned him fans from Tegucigalpa to Tehran.
With the election of Obama — who is overwhelmingly popular in Latin America — the old zingers just don’t pack the same punch. As the Obama administration loosens restrictions against Cuba, it’s harder for Chávez to paint the United States as an all-purpose enemy of the Latin American left. The region’s new generation of leftists, like El Salvador’s recently elected president Mauricio Funes, are modeling themselves after Brazil’s Lula rather than Chávez or Castro. After last week’s coup in Honduras, Chávez tried to blame the United States for orchestrating the events, a claim that seemed a bit dubious after the Obama administration vocally supported ousted President Manuel Zelaya and invited him to Washington. With his foreign-policy influence declining along with the value of his oil reserves, Chávez might wish he had the old donkey to kick around again.
