Caracas, Venezuela

IF President Hugo Chávez has dreamed of turning Venezuela into a Cuba with oil, the Venezuelans who oppose him have discovered the perfect antidote: the student movement.

At the time of last month’s referendum on Mr. Chávez’s efforts to remake the Constitution to his liking, I got to know some of the “chamos,” as the student activists are known. What struck me was not only how effective they were, but how different their movement was from almost all its many antecedents in the region.

Most important, the Venezuelans are not calling for socialist revolution, but for liberal democracy. Instead of vindicating the statist ideologies of the 20th century or the romantic passions of the 19th, they have embraced classic 18th-century humanism. “Our struggle is historic,” Yon Goicoechea, a law student at Andrés Bello Catholic University and one of the political movement’s leaders, told me as we sat, along with eight of his fellow leaders, in the offices of the independent newspaper El Nacional. They had brought with them pads and pens, but I was the one who learned and took notes. As Mr. Goicoechea puts it, “Like Martin Luther King, we do not fight against a man, we fight for the vindication of civil and human rights for everyone in Venezuela.”

As with the radicals who preceded them, they have genuine concern for the poor. But they also have concrete plans to develop their country, and they embody a hope for reconciliation across the brutal divisions of Venezuelan society.