How did a movement started by a one-time hero of the American left end in an authoritarian dictatorship? Before Nicólas Maduro, Venezuela was led by Hugo Chávez, who was buddies with Danny Glover and Sean Penn. Chávez had lunch in New York with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, who also once traveled to Venezuela to praise Chávez's economic policies. He was Oliver Stone's guest at the Venice Film Festival, where he flirted with a photographer on the red carpet and stayed up late sharing a bottle and a half of tequila with Michael Moore.
Human Rights Watch called attention to Chávez's authoritarian tendencies back in 2008, but many intellectuals on the left were so drawn by his willingness to turn Venezuela into a laboratory for their most radical ideas that they looked the other way. "What's so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela [is that] I can see how a better world is being created," the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Noam Chomsky said at a public event with Chávez in 2009.
