Venezuela is not my country. I have no blood ties to it; I only began traveling there less than a decade ago. Yet, I have found myself emotionally entangled in its freedom struggle. It’s not just that current images of students at the barricades and soldiers suppressing them remind me of 1968—that year we took to the streets of Mexico City and felt such exhilaration followed by such brutally crushing despair. But I have come to consider Venezuela the pivotal country in Latin America, where events are freighted with extra meaning for the rest of us.

My initial interest in Venezuela was spurred by Mexican events. In 2006, Mexico completed a fiercely contested election. The charismatic candidate of the left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had been defeated by a thin margin. But it was a result that he refused to accept, and the discord provoked by that election began to plague Mexico, and, in fact, it persists to this day.

I had been very critical of López Obrador. His program, I felt, was marred by statism and ultra-nationalism. And so, the year after his defeat, I wanted to see and experience, with my own eyes, a country governed by a populist leader who shared some of hisstyle. I paid my first of many visits to Caracas.

Hugo Chávez had been in power for nine years. His government was waging an ideological war. It officially viewed the populace as divided between the socialists of the Bolivarian Revolution and its opponents: “lackeys of the Empire,” “small-time Yankees,” traitors to the nation. Venezuela has one of the most atrocious histories of violence on the continent, and it seemed to me a miracle that the country had not plunged into civil war.

Of course, Chávez had gained power through free elections and he continued to win elections. But he also co-opted or bullied every political institution that should have served as a counterweight to the presidency. He had direct control of the resources of PDVSA, the national petroleum company, enabling him to use its immense wealth at his own discretion. The growing nationalization of private industry foreshadowed a state that would eventually seek to emulate and even perfect the Cuban model.