Venezuela

Ever since Christopher Columbus first explored its Caribbean coast in 1498, Venezuela has been known as the gateway to South America. But it got its name from one of the great gateways to Europe: Venezuela means "Little Venice," which the Spaniards called the country after seeing the stilt houses the Guajiro Indians had built in Lake Maracaibo. The prodigious oil that was discovered in that lake some four centuries later eventually made Venezuela the strategic hemispheric player it is today — especially under its current President, the leftist revolutionary Hugo Chávez.

Chavez and his fellow Venezuelans revere the Caracas-born hero of South American independence, Simón Bolívar, who led the region's early 19th-century revolt against Spain. Bolívar's military exploits across the Andes, his prolific writings on the fragile project of democracy in Latin America and his warnings against U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere have made him the George Washington of South America—and the namesake of Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution, which today preaches a populist, anti-U.S. gospel of Latin American integration.

Back in the 1800s, however, Bolívar's dream of a unified continent of democratic republics died with him; he lamented later in life that he had "plowed the sea." Like most South American nations, Venezuela found itself under the boot heels of caudillos (strongmen) and dictators for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. Joseph Conrad, in fact, made Venezuela the setting of his 1904 novel, Nostromo, an especially dark and pessimistic commentary on politics.

Yet Venezuela's best-known novel, Rómulo Gallegos' 1931 Doña Bárbara — a saga about the rule of law coming to the country's primitive llanos, or rugged cowboy plains — offered a more optimistic vision. Indeed, by the time Venezuela's last dictator, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, was ousted in 1958, the country was acknowledged to have the hemisphere's largest oil reserves and looked to be on the threshold of affluent, democratic modernity.

For the next four decades, despite having to suppress leftist guerrilla campaigns in the 1960s and '70s, Venezuela was widely considered a model in Latin America. It revived its Bolívarian roots in 1976 when it ousted U.S. and other foreign oil firms and nationalized the industry under the state-run Petróleos de Venezuela, which is today the world's fifth-largest oil company. Immigrants poured in from Europe and Asia, and the mountain-ringed capital, Caracas, boomed into a cosmopolitan metropolis. The nation got the nickname "Saudi Venezuela;" flights were booked solid for weekend shopping jaunts to Miami, and Venezuelan women all but monopolized Miss Universe pageants.

But, like the beauty queens, Venezuela's progress was largely a façade. The ruling elite, known as los cogollos, or chieftains, were in reality running an antidemocratic kleptocracy: corruption was so brazen that despite the nation's oil wealth more than half the population still lived in poverty by the 1990s. Hence the bloody 1992 coup attempt led by Chávez, then an army paratrooper colonel from the llanos. It failed, but it made Chávez a hero to the poor—whose clamor prodded the government to let him out of prison two years later. In 1998 Chávez won the Miraflores presidential palace by a landslide, with ballots instead of bullets.

Chávez rewrote the Constitution to give Presidents six-year instead of five-year terms and let them run for re-election; he then won a special election in 2000 under the new charter. But the class-warfare tone of his government and his close friendship with Cuba's communist leader, Fidel Castro, quickly polarized Venezuela—leading to a failed coup against Chávez himself in 2002 and a national recall referendum on his presidency in 2004, which he defeated. Relations with the U.S. went south—Chávez is perhaps best known for his verbal attacks on President Bush. But skyrocketing oil prices only strengthened his hand at home and abroad, where he has forged strategic alliances with non-hemispheric powers like China and Iran.

Chávez's vast social welfare programs, which have made Venezuela's most squalid barrios feel enfranchised for a change, helped him win re-election, again by a landslide, in December 2006. The question now is whether Chávez—who critics insist has his own authoritarian if not dictatorial ambitions—will change the Constitution again to let himself run for a third term in 2012 and others after that.

Meantime, Venezuela (pop.: 27 million) remains geographically one of the most beautiful and diverse countries on Earth: its natural showcases included the world's highest waterfall, Angel Falls. Chávez's rambunctious llano style can be jarring, but it's also a reflection of the nation's delightfully earthy and ardent music, from the harp and guitar of joropo to the driving percussion of gaita. A British newspaper has remarked that Venezuela today is boxing above its weight in the global ring. Chávistas attribute that to Hugo's revolutionary bravado; his opponents counter that he's simply dragging Venezuela back to its benighted caudillo past. Either way, Venezuelans believe their country, the cradle of Bolívar, deserves a higher stature in the world's eyes —at least as high as the stilt houses the Spanish saw in Lake Maracaibo.

—Tim Padgett