Latin America and the far Left has been a one-sided love story, interspersed by inconvenient truths. It venerates a crude Left-populism that ends up looking awfully like the corrupt regimes it set out to replace. Challengers are oppressed, economics become the plaything of vanity-project leaders. The saga of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro's dysfunctional helmsmanship is just the latest and most dramatic incarnation of a longer story of self-indulgent political thinking.
