For well over a decade Latin America has not produced the powerful romantic heroes that the rest of the world craves. Stable democracy represented by a succession of well groomed, urbane, middle-aged men in suits (whose names are rarely remembered) may look better than the bloody horrors of the 1970s and 1980s. But it has not been enough to satisfy our latent desire that Latin America should indulge our fantasies by delivering stories of desperados who triumph against the odds. Now there's Hugo Chavez, the recently re-confirmed president of Venezuela.
Chavez led a coup in 1992, and touched the hearts of Venezuelans even though he failed to overthrow the spectacularly corrupt president, Carlos Andres Perez. The coup attempt set off a chain reaction which eventually consumed everything that had been built up over the previous 40 years. First the political establishment turned on Perez and destroyed him. They, in their turn, were destroyed by Chavez when he ran for the presidency in 1998 and was voted into the presidential palace he had once tried to occupy by force. Since then he has dismantled all the institutions made rotten from within by the corrupt politicians.
As well as being immensely popular, Chavez has all the characteristics we've come to expect of a radical Latin American strongman. He is macho, active, smart, witty, brave and counts himself a friend of Fidel Castro. Richard Gott has fallen in love with Chavez. He admits as much in the last few pages of his book; though the extraordinary novelistic description of their first meeting at the beginning has already given the game away.
Gott catches sight of Chavez in the presidential palace in Caracas: " . . . he was standing in the garden with his back to me, gazing out towards the small forest of bamboos and palms fringing the far end of the lawn. [In public] he always appears decisive and radiates confidence and optimism. Yet alone in the garden he appeared more vulnerable, a monochrome and ambiguous sculpture on a green lawn dressed in a grey suit."
Chavez in government has surrounded himself with many of Gott's old friends from the 1960s, former revolutionaries now in their seventies and eighties whom Gott would have known when he wrote about Latin America when Che Guevara was in his heyday. There is a sense in which Chavez is the dynamo of their dreams. One of them, the Venezuelan foreign minister, Jose Vicente Rangel tells Gott: "It is a mistake to demonise Chavez just as it is a mistake to sanctify him. If he had not emerged there would certainly have been somebody else."
There are two deep reasons why there might have been somebody else. One is that - as Conor Cruise O'Brien recognised in an acutely observed piece of reportage on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua 15 years ago - an appeal to nationalism is an essential feature of radical politics in Latin America. Hidden beneath the simple and well-known inequalities of wealth is a corresponding radical divide between the (white) criollos and the (brown) mestizos. Any attempt to represent the dispossessed majority involves reconstitiuting the nation as Chavez has set out to do. The Latin American elite which wields power - the businessmen, the bankers and the intellectuals - takes its cues from abroad. Thus for more than a decade one country after another has faithfully followed the prevailing orthodoxy of globalisation and free trade. Chavez, like a long line of social reformers before him, is appealing to those dispossessed, non-cosmopolitan masses whom he regards as citizens of the real nation.
THE other reason why Chavez is not unique is that, despite the fixed image of the Latin American general as a thug in dark glasses, reforming military leaders are not an aberration but part of a long tradition. Over the last 40 years Peru, Panama, Bolivia and Ecuador and even, for a few months, El Salvador have all been led at one stage by colonels with a conscience. Ultimately they were unable to desist from the authoritarian outlook which enabled them to carry off their coup d'etats. A habit of conspiracy and plotting was no preparation for building popular support for transforming the nation. Gott writes that Chavez is an exception because the aims of his failed coup were subsequently "ratified by a grateful people" (a phrase which carries a faint odour of that demogogic messianism which Chavez has repudiated). He mentions Chavez's detractors but dismisses their concerns - elsewhere, though, he confesses uncertainty about whether Chavez's rule will end in tears.
We'll see how things turn out. But for the moment Chavez has a competitor as a model for the rest of Latin America: Vicente Fox, the new president of Mexico, whose election ended more than 70 years of one-party rule. He's a man in a suit, but like Chavez he's on a crusade against corruption; he's a former Coca Cola executive, but he has a similar charisma to Chavez, the former paratrooper: and like Chavez, he has enlisted support from a wide range of social groups. Hugo Chavez is an interesting phenomenon after years of great suits. But he's not the only Latin American leader worth keeping an eye on.
Maurice Walsh is a BBC journalist: he has reported extensively on Latin America