Central and South America is afflicted with “Old Europe Disease”, which is a devolved version of a royal aristocracy.
Typically, a dozen or so wealthy families control most of the nation’s wealth. But unlike far more egalitarian America, where the wealthy don’t mind at all when others become wealthy, in the OED countries, the wealthy strive that there be only two classes: the very wealthy and the peasants.
They do not want a middle class, and they certainly do not want an upper middle class with aspirations to become wealthy, so scheme with the government they control to keep this from happening.
In turn, this builds tremendous resentment among the poor, who gravitate to violent egalitarian movements, often socialist or communist.
Yet with great irony, if they ever succeed in overthrowing the government, the revolutionaries set themselves up as the new aristocracy. This is because the poor, as well as the wealthy, suffer from OED. They neither understand nor appreciate what a middle class can be in a nation.
This is why a crude baboon like Chavez imagines himself as the aristocratic Simón Bolívar, a legitimate Spanish nobleman.
And it is also why central and South America have been afflicted with both pseudo-aristocratic tyrants and violent egalitarian revolutions for hundreds of years.
The Sandinistas did the same thing — overthrew the old regime, then moved into their mansions.