I sure hope that Hugo Chavez’s defeat in Sunday’s referendum will indeed be the beginning of the end of the Venezuelan autocrat’s version of Latin American leftism. But perhaps even more important than Chavez’s eventual downfall would be the vindication of the region’s other brand of leftist thought.

More than a battle between left and right, Latin America has long been immersed in a struggle between chavismo, or old-fashioned populism, and chilenismo, or forward-looking, open social democracies. As several of the region’s intellectuals have pointed out, chavismo has been winning the fight mostly due to its Venezuelan patron saint’s oil-enriched coffers and the region’s weird fascination with revolutionary leaders – our infatuation with “Che-chic”, if you will. My hope is that Chavez’s loss – and his recent, demented outbursts against King Juan Carlos and Colombia’s president Uribe – will begin to expose the man for what he really is: a populist narcissist.

That could start some sort of domino-effect. Nothing could benefit Latin America’s transition more than for the region as a whole to have a solid, modern left. Mexico itself badly needs it. My own country’s democratic transition will not be complete until Mexico’s disjointed leftist party moves away from the Chavez like figure of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and embraces the sort of tolerant and advanced left that has led Chile’s modernization. Maybe then we’ll see Ricardo Lagos’s picture printed on t-shirts. That would be the day…