Venezuela’s recent legislative elections confirmed trends that have repeatedly brought the country into the headlines in recent years. President Hugo Chávez showed once again that he enjoys broad support among the nation’s poor and desperate, and that he is miles ahead of his opposition in terms of political skill, cunning, and ruthlessness. Yet at the same time voter turnout is declining with each passing election under Chávez, and the questionable fairness of the electoral process has grown increasingly apparent.

To be sure, the opposition’s withdrawal from the election just days before the vote was, as Chávez claimed, more a symptom of its own weakness than of problems with the electoral process. And, just as surely, that very weakness is a function of the gradual stifling of many features of Venezuela’s traditional democratic order.

Even so, the opposition’s mistakes have been massive, ranging from support for the failed coup against the democratically elected Chávez in April 2002 to the failed strike at PEDEVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company, in early 2003. Nothing is more lethal in politics than failure in direct confrontation.

In such circumstances, Chávez can afford to be bold, despite his policies’ failure to benefit his core constituency: the more than 50% of Venezuelans who live in destitution and despair. Poverty has grown since Chávez took office in 1998; government finances and the trade balance are more dependent on oil revenues than before, and, aside from Cuban literacy programs and neighborhood “barefoot doctor” services, the overall welfare of the poor remains the same, if not worse.

Major changes are unlikely in the foreseeable future. Chávez will be able to modify the Constitution largely as he pleases, and pack both the justice system and the electoral authority with his placemen. He will continue to dole out oil-based subsidies in the well-worn Venezuelan tradition of Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Carlos Andrés Pérez. As a result, Chávez will be re-elected late next year, and he may well remain in power until the end of the next decade.

Yet, if this is what the Venezuelan people want, then so be it. It is, after all, their business who governs them, and how, as long as human rights are not systematically violated, democratic institutions are not indefinitely suspended, and standard norms of international conduct are respects.

Judged by the last standard, at least, Chávez may have crossed the line. For years, he has been accused of taking over where Fidel Castro left off: supporting the rhetoric of radicalism and anti-imperialism, if not revolution, throughout Latin America. It could now be time for other Latin American nations and the international community to take such charges more seriously.

Chávez is giving away oil to Caribbean island nations and Cuba, and buying off Argentine debt to help President Nestor Kirchner’s political fortunes. In Mar del Plata, Argentina, last month, he openly participated in a rally against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), in the company of, among others, Evo Morales, the coca-leaf growers’ leader from Bolivia who might well become that country’s next president.

Similarly, Chávez is clearly supporting Daniel Ortega, the perennial Sandinista presidential candidate in Nicaragua, and Shafick Handal, the equally perennial FMLN candidate in El Salvador. His former ambassador to Mexico participated openly and vociferously in campaign events for Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador’s presidential campaign.

There seems to be a common thread to most of Chávez’s foreign policy: to provoke a major confrontation with the United States. The danger, of course, is that if and when confrontation comes – over Bolivia, the FTAA, human rights, or press freedoms – it will be too late to defuse it. The challenge, then, lies in avoiding a confrontation that Chávez clearly wants. Unfortunately, George W. Bush’s administration has not proved particularly adept at conflict prevention.

The hemisphere’s other nations have a direct stake in attempting to pre-empt a fight that would force them to take sides and might threaten their economic and national-security interests. Although many of Chávez’s positions have found support in certain Latin American nations, the division that he and Castro’s Cuba have created in Latin America – between left and right, free-traders and “Bolivarians,” and pro- and anti- Americans – is mainly artificial and certainly not impossible to overcome.

To be sure, many Latin American leaders have tried to assuage and control Chávez, and they have all failed. But the cost of not trying again could be extremely high. The last time revolutionary leaders confronted the US head-on, in Central America during the 1980’s, everyone lost. A new split up and down the hemisphere, engineered by a leader awash in oil money, would prove far more disastrous.