In December 1998, preaching a gospel of socialist revolution that had gone blessedly unvoiced in the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hugo Chávez won a landslide election for the presidency of Venezuela. At the time, his governing philosophy, dubbed "Chávismo," seemed unlikely to amount to more than a historical and geographical anomaly—a temporary reversal in a region that appeared to have decisively rejected Marxist nostrums. Nearly another decade has passed since Mr. Chávez's ascension. He has suffered a few setbacks in the intervening years, notably a temporary ouster in a 2002 coup and a defeat in a referendum last year that, if passed, would have effectively made him dictator for life. His propensity for wild rhetoric and diktats—as when he created a new time zone by fiat in December 2007, moving the clocks...
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