HUGO CHÁVEZ is merely the latest in a long line of leaders from apparently rather impotent Latin American nations to have got seriously under the skin of the world’s most prosperous and powerful nation.

Indeed, since the start of the Cold War 60 years ago few caricatures have ranked higher in the demonology of the American mindset than the communist-sympathising, populist, Latin American insurgent, fomenting anti-US sentiment in the hemisphere Washington has long considered its own backyard.

From Che Guevara to Salvador Allende to Daniel Ortega, via a host of bit-part players, to the greatest impresario of them all — Fidel Castro — the US has variously sought to undermine, subvert and in some cases eliminate figures that it viewed as a threat to its vital interests.

Nor was this Latin American fixation simply a regional sub-plot of the life-or-death struggle represented by the fight against communism. After a victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898 that marked the expulsion of the last serious European influence in the Americas, the US launched military operations in Latin America no fewer than 32 times in 30 years – to Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and others.

In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt added his own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of almost a century earlier that warned European powers not to interfere in Latin America. He asserted the American right to intervene in any country in the region for the sake of stability:

“Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship . . . Chronic wrongdoing, however . . . may force the United States to exercise an international police power.”

That same strategic doctrine was invoked when President Reagan sent US Marines to Grenada in 1983, when the elder President Bush invaded Panama in 1989 and when President Clinton dispatched a fleet to Haiti in 1994.

Much of the rest of the world has looked on with a mixture of disapproval and bemusement at the spectacle of the US repeatedly working itself into a froth over tinpot dictators and banana republicans in countries that would fit comfortably into a corner of Texas or New York.

But while some such exercises — the invasion of that threatening Caribbean giant of Grenada springs to mind — may indeed have been monumental overkill, more the product of domestic American political needs than genuine geopolitical challenges, the vulnerability America feels to Latin volatility is real.

Twenty years before Grenada, Cuba was the centre of a crisis that nearly produced a global nuclear holocaust, so it is hardly surprising the region has the capacity to exert a special influence over American fears. Before September 11, 2001, the only obvious threat to US territorial integrity had been assumed to derive from the nations to its south.

No single country – not even Mexico, its large, teeming and often politically unpredictable neighbour — has ever had the capacity to challenge America’s economic or physical security.

But Washington has always feared that an international contagion of the potent anti-US sentiment that defines politics in much of the region could pose a real threat. An alliance of anti-American nations could staunch the spread of free market principles to the region, undermine economic growth and look beyond Washington for economic and political ties.

Señor Chávez seems to have established a colony of his brand of populism in Bolivia, where the new President Evo Morales sounds increasingly like a kind of Mini-Me to Señor Chàvez’s Dr Evil, raising taxes, nationalising energy supplies and seeking warm diplomatic relations with Iran and China. Peru could go the same way next month if the former military officer Ollanta Humala wins the presidential election.

But broader successes for Señor Chávez’s objectives may be harder to come by. Neither Brazil nor Argentina has shown much enthusiasm for his ambitions. Indeed, the biggest threat to America’s interests in the region probably comes from the longstanding and widespread suspicion of intervention and control by the Yanqui imperialists. There is no quicker way to win the hearts of the people in many Latin American countries than the claim the US has at some point tried to kill you.

Look at Señor Chávez’s hero across the Caribbean in Cuba. Fidel Castro probably owes his ability to defy the march of history as much to America’s repeated and failed attempts to dislodge him as to any achievements he may have secured for his people at home.

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