With the rise of Hugo Chávez and other presidents around the turn of the century, a new breed of leftist leaders challenged the postwar political and economic rules promoted by the United States. Many Latin American left-leaning governments openly used the language of dependency theory to depict their strategy. Joining together within both economic and political institutions that excluded the United States, they hoped that they could break the stranglehold of international capitalism and imperial designs. Strategies along these lines include trade agreements, the creation of international institutions, discussions of common currencies, and mutual aid. The ultimate goal of these various efforts is to establish political and economic autonomy from the United States. That would mean being freed from political interference, economic pressure, violations of sovereignty, or any other type of imposition from the hegemonic power. This chapter takes stock of the Latin American left’s ability to chart a course distinct from that preferred by the United States in the twenty-first century.

What happens to state bureaucracies when authoritarianism emerges? How do autocrats seek to use the administration to their ends? This chapter addresses these questions, analyzing Venezuela as a typical or representative case. Venezuela has been a (more or less) functioning democracy since 1958. Within the system of the so-called "Puntofijismo," major parties agreed to a consensual model of democracy, sharing offices and distributing revenues of the oil rent. The public administration supported and managed the distribution. This led to stability and wealth in regional comparison. In 1998, Hugo Chávez, a former military officer and failed putschist, assumed the presidency in Venezuela. In the following years, but especially under president Maduro, Venezuela experienced a severe decline of democracy and is today clearly an authoritarian regime. In this chapter, we analyze the strategies of the Chavista governments vis-à-vis the administration. We identify three main strategies to sideline the established bureaucracy: first, repression and firing; second, circumventing and neglecting, which means creating a "parallel state"; and third, militarization of the "civil" service.

Chapter six investigates the conditions under which new leaders can successfully tap into the charismatic founder’s legacy, reactivate citizens’ attachments, and return the movement to power. I identify three conditions that successors must fulfill to accomplish this task: They must (1) seek power as self-starters, long after the founder’s disappearance, rather than as anointed successors; (2) rise during a crisis to portray themselves as desperately needed saviors; and (3) adopt the founder’s personalistic style to revitalize and take ownership of the followers’ preexisting emotional bonds to the movement. Next, I demonstrate the relevance of these conditions by tracing the process through which several leaders across Peronism, Chavismo, and Peru’s Fujimorismo failed while others succeeded in reviving the movement. The results indicate that leaders who fulfilled all three conditions established formidable new chapters of the movement in their own name; in contrast, leaders who did not fulfill one or more of these conditions suffered a political failure.