NCM Online (though I’m not sure exactly what what that is) ran a reasonably good summary of the significance of Latin America’s currrent "turn to the left," the most recent evidence of which is Tabaré Vásquez’s victory in Uruguay’s presidential elections and the emergence of Mexico City’s leftist mayor López Obrador as the front-runner in Mexico’s upcoming presidential election.

In contemplating the question "just how left-wing are they?", the author notes:

While bashing the IMF and the World Bank has become the region’s norm, no leader - not even Chávez - is seriously contemplating a rejection of the basic principles of Keynesian economics even if some, like Kirchner, challenge IMF mandates. Befitting this pattern, as Latin America’s new left-of-center states go about creating safety nets for the poor, they continue to court foreign investment and encourage capitalist ventures to help pay for them.

On the gap between the theory and practice of the new left in Latin America, as can be seen in Chávez’s government, Dr. James Petras of the University of New York at Binghamton has written that the Venezuelan leader "is closer to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal than Castro’s Socialist revolution."

Nonetheless, the recent developments will continue to be a source of worry for Bush’s Latin America team, particularly in the realm of petro-politics:

If [Obrador] wins in Mexico, the Bush administration will be faced with four left-of-center hemispheric powerhouses: Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The nightmare scenario for the Bush team would then be Chávez inviting Mexico’s state owned oil company, Pemex, into a cooperative arrangement with the Venezuelan leader’s oil trading bloc, Petrosur, which already includes Argentina and, as of March 2, Uruguay. Given that Mexico and Venezuela are two of the United States’ top four sources of foreign oil imports (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada), a combined Obrador-Chávez alliance would account for upwards of a quarter of all U.S. petroleum imports. It’s easy to anticipate how the Bush administration would react to such a petro bloc emerging, recalling Henry Kissinger’s old adage that any threat to Saudi oil exports to the United States would be a causus belli.