THEY call themselves the “axis of good”, with America in the role of the bad and the ugly. In another era the alliance between an oil-rich joker in Venezuela, an ageing Cuban dictator and a jumper-wearing Bolivian peasant leader would hardly be worthy of superpower attention, but Latin America’s shift to the left is presenting the United States with one of its biggest political and security headaches.

In Venezuela last week Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, the Islamic fundamentalist Speaker of the Iranian parliament, dropped by to exchange fraternal greetings with Hugo Chavez, the socialist president. “Iran and the Middle East and Venezuela and Latin America can act as two convergent axes to neutralise the plans of arrogant world powers,” Adel said, adding that Iran would be delighted to help Venezuela with peaceful nuclear know-how.

It is not just a retort to President George W Bush’s designation of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil”. Latin America is breaking out of its northern neighbour’s back yard. Flush with oil money, Venezuela and Iran are providing a new model of resistance to the West. All are welcome to join. The leaders of Hamas, the radical Islamic victors of the Palestinian elections, were invited last week to tour Latin America. Chavez was said to have offered a private plane.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, has just announced that he will visit Cuba in September to express his gratitude to Fidel Castro, a perennial troublemaker for America. Cuba voted with Syria and Venezuela against plans by the International Atomic Energy Agency to report Iran to the United Nations security council over its nuclear programme.

Although it remains a distant threat, the Pentagon and the CIA did not see off the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 only to allow a fresh alliance of potentially nuclear-armed America-haters to form as close as 90 miles from the coast of Florida.

In Bolivia the election in December of Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, presents a further challenge to the traditional order. The native populations of a central Andean region stretching across Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador are flexing their political power and contesting the dominance of local white elites.

During his election Morales vowed to become Bush’s “worst nightmare”; Ollanta Humala, another indigenous candidate, could win in Peru in two months’ time.

Morales, a former llama herder, trumpet player and coca workers’ leader, has become a fashion icon for the developing world in his trademark striped jumper. In a significant diplomatic victory, he persuaded America last week to reconsider its policy of capping Bolivian coca production after promising to curb cocaine trafficking.

He also urged coca workers to nominate him for a Nobel peace prize. “Then the gringos will stop bothering and threatening us,” he said.

Morales’s new best friend is Castro or “el commandante”, as he respectfully called his elderly mentor on his first foreign visit as president. Castro, 79, beamed at his new protégé, saying his election was “something extraordinary” that had “rocked the world”.

The Cuban leader is revelling in his role as the godfather of Latin America’s new generation of leftists. Reviled by many as a repressive dictator who was recently locking up democratic opponents and presiding over a bankrupt nation, he is being lionised again in some quarters thanks to the fulsome tributes and subsidies being paid to him by Chavez. Venezuela today provides more aid to Cuba than the Soviet Union of old, providing a vital boost to Castro’s ailing regime.

The blustering Venezuelan is the real power behind the new axis. Chavez has often been written off as a clown with cheeky jokes about “Condolencia” (condolence) Rice, the US secretary of state, and how she “dreams” of being with a hot-blooded Venezuelan like him. “I cannot marry Condolencia because I am too busy,” he has said.

Every Sunday he addresses the nation for hours in a television broadcast called Hello President! in which he takes live questions from the audience and shows off his social programmes in the slums. He has dubbed Bush “Mr Danger” and pledged that “we are going to defeat the empire”.

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