A film review is not your typical opener for a UN General Assembly speech, but then Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is not your typical speaker and this is not your usual film. Chávez was praising his joint effort with Oliver Stone in producing South of the Border, Stone’s documentary that glorifies the Chávez-led Bolivarian Revolution of the past decade. But then media presentation is Chávez’s speciality. Chávez’s one-minute television speech in February 1992 to call down his troops from his attempted coup made him a cult revolutionary hero, when he expressed regret that his quest had failed por ahora (‘for now’), a slogan he still uses.

What is most remarkable about Chávez’s manipulation of the media is the extent to which he has successfully recast his populist power grab as a Bolivarian Revolution, so named to cash in on the image of the beloved liberator Simón Bolivar, who freed modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú and Panamá from Spanish rule. In other words, Chávez and his sympathetic heads of state (Castro in Cuba, Zelaya in Honduras, Ortega in Nicaragua, Morales in Bolivia and Correa in Ecuador) are purporting to be Bolivar’s ideological heirs: fellow revolutionaries liberating the marginalized indigenous population against a foreign ravager or an oppressive white oligarchy.

However, there are two problems with this Bolivarian formulation. First, it misconstrues historical reality in the region. Second, it relies on the cynical manipulation of a myth originating with the white European conquistadores, which is why contemporary Anglo-Europeans are taken in by the story and why it is so dangerous for South Americans to believe it.

Like Mark Twain’s demise, stories of oppression by a white oligarchy have been greatly exaggerated. Almost all Latinos are some shade of mestizo: a brown-skinned mixture of white, black and indigenous Indian. Perhaps for this reason South America has never suffered South African-style apartheid or even American-style racism. Now Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Honduras are all violently divided along socio-economic fault lines, in ways they were not before the Bolivarian propaganda.

While it is true that Latin America has always had an enormous class divide and a lot of corruption, a decade of the Bolivarian Revolution has not only failed to resolve these, but exacerbated them. In Venezuela the Gini Coefficient of income inequality has actually risen under Chávez and food is scarce and expensive, since even staples like milk (once widely available) now have to be imported. So much for the socialist agrarian revolution.

The most widely-accepted lie of the Bolivarian Revolution is that it has redressed the injustices of a thieving and oppressive ‘oligarchy’ that has absconded with the profits from natural resources and returned power to the people. Venezuela’s formidable oil reserves are a prime example: since Royal Dutch Shell drilled Venezuela’s very first oil well in 1914, foreigners lived like kings off Venezuelan oil in sprawling Caracas mansions, until the Venezuelan government completely nationalized the oil in 1976. So whatever thieving oligarchs there may have been had to be government bureaucrats or Brits, Americans or Dutch: the same people who are now getting their history wrong and promoting the Bolivarian Revolution that has brought such division and violence.

People have wanted to believe in the Bolivarian Revolution because it fits nicely into another regional paradigm of the ‘good revolutionary’ that has been sanctified by its ideological inheritance dating back to the Conquest: the convenient idealizations of the Europeans on the one hand and the anger of the conquered on the other.

Pope Sixtus IV’s 1481 papal bull Aeterni Regis argued that pagan natives’ right to self-rule was overridden by papal responsibility for their souls. Bringing these ‘noble savages’ into Christendom would purify both the homeland (patria) and the conquerors, who effectively became ‘holy warriors’. So it’s no surprise that the discovery of the New World (Nueva Granada) was so wildly mythologized that when Columbus landed in Venezuela he wrote in his diaries that he had found the Garden of Eden. The myth of the noble savage has persisted and become transmuted over time to a more modern persona: the savior of Latin American culture. This mythic figure is disseminated through the public media, and is highly susceptible to misuse by political elites. These myths set up a type or persona, which the average person who wants to be a good patriot or citizen will do his best to resemble.

What I find alarming and objectionable is that more than half a millennium later Latin Americans should turn this conquest ideology on themselves, in an act of ultimate self-loathing. Rather than accepting mestizo culture as the prime example of cultural assimilation, they have based their liberation rhetoric on this past shared trauma, whose ability to cross generational lines would be doubtful, had it not been so mythologized to serve political ends. Chávez and his Bolivarian cronies have successfully tapped into both this anger and this perversely Eurocentric mythology to turn their nations in on themselves in a near civil-war to stage a conquest from within.

In 1992, when Chávez shot to fame as an ambitious young putschist, the world reveled in condemning the quincentenary of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, claiming he unleashed the greatest genocide ever seen and drawing a direct line between the Conquest of the Americas and the Holocaust, trivializing and obfuscating both events. Rage against the foreign imperialist was on every Latin American’s mind, and Chávez was clever enough to exploit it by positioning himself as the good native revolutionary hero out to liberate (and purify) the natives.

Since the checks and balances that would constrain the politicians are themselves subject to revision by those in power (as we have seen in various re-written constitutions and the new ‘media crimes’ law allowing the imprisonment of any critical journalist), the struggle for political power is a struggle for control over the rules of the political game: a struggle for absolute power.

To manipulate emotions is to manipulate what we value, to change our individual identity and ideas of the good life, in turn shaping our national identity and our common public culture, both of which are informative (if not constitutive) of individual identity. So it is important for a demagogue to manipulate the emotions of his people, for emotions shape values.

It is crucial that as informed and rational citizens we are able to identify these politically-motivated mythologies, lest we lapse into a demagogic populism that slides down the slippery slope of tyranny. The trend is worrying not because Latin America has a history of liberal democracies of a Rawlsian or Habermasian stripe before the recent demagogues, but rather because the current movement points in the direction of one possible future amongst several: a future with a fractured society and little liberal democracy. The special problem with politically-motivated myths is that they get their power by appealing to and motivating that part of us that is base and non-rational. In that respect, they degrade us.

Dr Vanessa Neumann is a Venezuelan-born political philosopher, currently Editor-at-Large of Diplomat and Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Hudson Institute.